Kindle App has Dictionary and Translation function

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zenmonkey
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Kindle App has Dictionary and Translation function

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:21 am

One of my largest complaints about the *old* Kindle app on the iPhone/iPad was that had only an English dictionary and one basically had to hack it to have German or other languages.

It now has about a dozen or so dictionaries available covering various languages including Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Dutch.

It also one to highlight and get a direct translation from the Bing engine.

The news is old - it's been 2 years since this was available, but if you are like me and gave up on them a while back, this might be useful to know.
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steyyan
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Re: Kindle App has Dictionary and Translation function

Postby steyyan » Mon Aug 03, 2015 10:56 am

Another thing worth mentioning is that the PC version supports Japanese now, which only the mobile versions and the Kindle devices did before the Kindle for PC update half a year ago. However, its dictioanry function is even worse than that on the Android app, since it doesn't even allow custom dictionaries. Also, it doesn't work with verbs and adjectives that aren't in their respective "dictionary forms".

dAs for the ebooks, the Japanese HP books are available in all regions, and by using a Tenso address for instance, you can access the Japanese Kindle store outside Japan.
Last edited by steyyan on Mon Aug 03, 2015 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kindle App has Dictionary and Translation function

Postby emk » Mon Aug 03, 2015 11:42 am

If you're learning English, many Kindle books also support "WordWise", which tries to identify the most difficult words in a text, and shows definitions inline above the words. There's a slider to control the difficulty level at which definitions appear.

This looks really slick, and I'd love to see it for non-English languages.

(I only know about this because my phone, computer, TV, etc., have all been set to French for years. This improves my technical vocabulary a bit, and occasionally causes an app like Audible to default to a different country's store. Also, GPS voice navigation with Google Maps is interesting—the French voice has often struggled with the concept of "miles". But now I can give directions to French drivers, which is surprisingly useful.)
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Re: Kindle App has Dictionary and Translation function

Postby Doitsujin » Mon Aug 03, 2015 8:47 pm

zenmonkey wrote:One of my largest complaints about the *old* Kindle app on the iPhone/iPad was that had only an English dictionary and one basically had to hack it to have German or other languages.

It now has about a dozen or so dictionaries available covering various languages including Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Dutch.

BTW, you can also replace one of the default monolingual dictionaries of the Android app with bilingual dictionaries, by overwriting a dictionary in /Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/ with another dictionary with the same name.
IIRC, the iOS and PC apps aren't as easily fooled; in addition to renaming the dictionary file, you'll also need to change the ASIN number of the replacement dictionary so that it matches the ASIN number of the default dictionary that it replaces.

emk wrote:If you're learning English, many Kindle books also support "WordWise", which tries to identify the most difficult words in a text, and shows definitions inline above the words. There's a slider to control the difficulty level at which definitions appear.

I like the idea, but the WordWise definitions (whose size can't be adjusted) are a bit too tiny for my taste. BTW, since the Kindle format supports <ruby> tags, you could generate your own books with (hard-coded) WordWise definitions.
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