epub dictionaries

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Cavesa
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epub dictionaries

Postby Cavesa » Fri Sep 29, 2017 6:26 pm

I've been playing with an interesting idea for some time. Using readlang and epub dictionaries to generate just the anki decks I need, without tons of typing.

I have encountered a huge problem though. How to find them?

There are pdfs of printed dictionaries, which are useless for this and still not too common.
There are paper dictionaries, which would make me spent two lifetimes on each deck.
There are online dictionaries, which are great for quick searching of a particular word but definitely not allowing me to look at an enormous list of words (tens of thousands) and check the ones I want to learn.
There are frequency lists, which don't cover all I want at all.

Googling showed me a lot of glossaries of terms used together with epub. And dictionaries installable in a kindle.

The closest I got was this: https://archive.org/details/con00ciseoxforddicfowlrich which is a dictionary from 1919.

I don't mind buying one for a reasonable price at all. But I would hit a region block, I'm afraid. I would, if I at least found an epub dictionary!

Has anyone encountered one, please?
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mcthulhu
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Re: epub dictionaries

Postby mcthulhu » Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:16 pm

You might be better off looking for dictionaries in some other format, like plain text, and then converting them to epub with Calibre or something similar. What specific languages are you looking to start with? Once you get the data, you can worry about how to convert it. Format conversion should be the easy part. Are you sure you even need epub? For the application you described, it sounds like maybe a text file or spreadsheet where you could delete the rows you don't want to bulk-import might be easier than parsing an epub file. Unless your idea was to search, and then copy and paste one at a time?

See http://freedict.org/en/ and https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries. Coverage varies enormously by language, so what language you need matters.

Wiktionaries are downloadable - see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ ... Wiktionary.

WordNets are available for a number of languages. See http://globalwordnet.org/wordnets-in-the-world/. I know the English one is readily downloadable, and I think I've seen a site where the data's been converted to a SQL database. That should be fairly easy to dump to text.

The GoldenDict site has pointers to free dictionary downloads - http://www.goldendict.org/dictionaries.php.

I've downloaded a number of free dictionaries in various languages over the years, and don't necessarily remember where I found them, but the above links might be a start.
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Cavesa
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Re: epub dictionaries

Postby Cavesa » Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:40 pm

Thanks!

I need epub (or something convertible to epub) to use readlang with it. I don't want to bulk add a whole dictionary into anki and have to sort it out. It would be much easier to just pick all the words I want (and there would be many) in readlang, which would make an anki file for me. Plain text is surely convertible, but I think pdfs are not (and pdfs are the only thing I found and still not exactly what I wanted)

Copy and paste them one by one is not much different from rewriting them from a paper dictionary. I am talking about decks of a few thousand words.

I could do with French, Spanish, German, Italian for now. Or any combination of those, not just X to English.

I am in no hurry, this is an idea for a long time learning project.

Thanks for those links, they look like a nice starting point.
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Re: epub dictionaries

Postby rdearman » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:24 pm

Calibre will convert between formats, including PDF.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

calibre can convert dozens of file types. No matter where you got your e-book from, it’ll be ready for your device in no time. When converting, you can also automatically change the book’s style, create a table of contents or improve punctuation and margins. calibre will also detect the format that’s best suited for your device on its own, so you don’t have to bother.

calibre can also turn your personal documents to e-books or create them from scratch. It can also take all the mundane things that go with it off your plate. It has automatic style helpers and scripts generating the book’s structure. You focus on the content, calibre will take care of the rest.
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mcthulhu
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Re: epub dictionaries

Postby mcthulhu » Fri Sep 29, 2017 9:47 pm

PDFs can definitely be converted to epub; that is one of the options in Calibre that I have used frequently, because I much prefer epub format. Whether that is useful for your purposes depends on whether the underlying data consists of images or text; you want text PDFs. You should be able to test by trying to select specific words in the PDF, which you cannot do with image PDFs.

Another source of free dictionaries is https://termsuite.github.io/documentati ... ictionary/. Click on the "Bilingual Dictionaries" button at the bottom to download them. The .zip file contains dictionaries for various combinations of English, French, Spanish, and German, in a simple two-column format with multiple translations for the same word on separate lines. These are word pairs only, with no additional grammatical or usage information, intended for use with the TermSuite (terminology extraction) software. They might be good enough for your needs.

For flashcard use, it might or might not be desirable to write a reformat script to combine multiple pairs for the same word into a single entry, depending on how redundant the multiple pairs are (sometimes too many synonyms are just annoying). Anyway, the TermSuite dictionaries should be easy to convert into a searchable epub, with or without reformatting.
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