GoldenDict

GoldenDict is a computer open-source dictionary program that gives translations of words and phrases for different languages. It allows the use of several popular dictionary file formats simultaneously and without conversion.

The project aims to create a feature-rich dictionary search program.

Features

• The desktop program is free and open-source software (FOSS).
• Supports multiple electronic dictionary file formats,^[3] namely:
  • WordNet – a free lexical database for the English language
  • XDXF dictionary (XML Dictionary eXchange Format)^[4]
  • Babylon (.bgl) files with images and resources
  • StarDict (.ifo / .dict / .idx / .syn) dictionaries
  • Dictd (.index / .dict / .dz) dictionary files
  • ABBYY Lingvo (.dsl) source files, together with abbreviation files. The files can be optionally compressed with dictzip. Dictionary resources can be packed together into a .zip file
  • ABBYY Lingvo (.lsa / .dat) audio archives. Those can be indexed separately or referred to from .dsl files
  • Sdictionary (.dct) dictionaries. This format is also known as sdict.
  • Aard (.aar) dictionaries
  • Sound packs (.zips) in zip archives
  • MDict (.mdx / .mdd) dictionaries
  • EPWING (.Catalogs) dictionaries
• Uses WebKit layout engine for a more accurate article representation (including formatting, colors, images and links)
• Supports lookups in Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or any other MediaWiki-based sites
• Can use arbitrary websites as dictionaries via templated URL patterns
• Can translate long text of many languages (e.g. through Babelfish, by adding this line in GoldenDict: http://fr.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt?trtext=%GDWORD%&lp=fr_en for translating from French to English)
• Hunspell-based morphology system, used for word stemming and spelling suggestions
• Can index arbitrary directories with audio files for pronunciation lookups
• Can feed look up word to external program and print program output along other dictionary results
• Full Unicode case, diacritics, punctuation and whitespace folding. This means the ability to type in words without any accents, correct case, punctuation or spaces (e.g. typing "Grussen" would yield "grüßen" in German dictionaries)
• Supports Russian, Greek, German, Belarusian and Japanese transliteration
• Native TTS support in Windows and Mac OS X
• Scan popup functionality. A small popup window displays the translation of a word chosen from another application
• Support for global hotkeys (to activate the program window or translate a word from the clipboard)
• Tabbed browsing in a Qt 4 interface
• Supports NPAPI web plugins (e.g. Flash Player)
• Supports dictionary custom icons
• Cross-platform: Linux/X11, Mac OS X, Maemo, Android and Windows + portable to others (Android application is closed-source and is available in Google Play as both paid and free version (which displays advertisements and is limited to 5 dictionaries))
• Allows playback of pronunciation sound clips in different languages using Forvo online service

Advantages and shortcomings

Compared to other similar software GoldenDict:

• Supports several popular dictionary file formats, whereas Babylon and ABBYY Lingvo dictionary software support only one (native) format, and Stardict supports only two formats.
• The program's internal use of the WebKit layout engine allows displaying articles in a format similar to web pages in a web browser, which ABBYY Lingvo, StarDict and Babylon are unable to do.
• The current version (1.0.1) cannot perform full-text searches inside articles of a dictionary. However, finding text in the currently displayed article is possible.
• The Android version of GoldenDict is not open-source.

See also

• Machine translation
• Comparison of machine translation applications
• StarDict
• Lingoes (a single-click translation software)
• Esperanto dictionaries for GoldenDict (in Esperanto)

References

External links

• Independent review in Linux Magazine
• Description of Goldendict 1.0.1 at Softpedia
• GoldenDict web site
• Download page
• Download early access builds for Windows, Linux/X11 and MacOS
• Download nightly builds (in English and Russian, look for the latest post)
• Discussion forum (in English and Russian)
• Another discussion forum (in Russian)
• In StarDict format: HowToCreateDictionary and StarDictFileFormat