gottahavacuppamocha

I’ve been messing around with a program called StarDict for the past week or two. At it’s most basic level, StarDict is like an electronic dictionary. It doesn’t have any data of its own, but you can download dictionaries for it to use. Once that’s done you can just type in a word and get the definition. It also displays words with similar spelling, and there is a “fuzzy” search that allows wild cards.

The reason I got into it is because it can use multilingual dictionaries as well. On the website, there are dozens of them. Some languages even have several dictionaries compiled by different organizations. Most of them are only one direction i.e. Russian to English while a few are bidirectional i.e. Chinese-English/English-Chinese. I went a bit overboard and downloaded several dictionaries in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, and a few others. However, I quickly found not all of the dictionaries are alike.

StarDict has it’s own format for the dictionaries it uses and it seems like very few of the dictionaries were created specifically for the program. Apparently, to make the software more useful StarDict made a bunch of scripts to convert dictionaries in other formats (like DICT and mova) into the StarDict format. I think this had the intended consequence, as now there are dozens or hundreds of dictionaries that can be used by StarDict. However, I don’t think there was a lot of follow up on it because there are some issues.

I’m running about five or six different Russian dictionaries in StarDict at the moment. I think all or most of them were converted from another format. Two of them have over 100,000 words in the dictionary, however very few of the words are translated. They have the Russian term then a blank definition. I’m thinking the creators’ came up with a list of Russian terms, and only put in the English tems for the words they knew. Another one or two of the dictionaries have the English terms, but there are far fewer terms (between 30,000 and 70,000). The rest, I think, were just improperly converted because the definitions have a bunch of XML markup, in addition to having fewer terms.

To help make it easier for people to make dictionaries for StarDict from scratch, there is a tool called Stardict-Editor. This is a simple program that takes text files formatted just so, and converts them into the StarDict format. The StarDict-Editor also has a built in text editor to use, though I prefer Gedit. Over the past weekend, I’ve been occassionaly working on a bidirectional Russian-English and English-Russian dictionary. I’m up to over 500 terms so far :-) It isn’t difficult, but it is tedious, and I’m using StarDict to help me with it, even though some of the dictionaries are frustrating.

Overall, I think StarDict is a great program, though there are some flaws with some of the dictionaries. It’s currently available for Windows and Linux, and I saw in an online forum somewhere that it is being ported to Palm, which I think will be great, IMHO.

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4. Русский
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