GoldenDict

GoldenDict is an open-source dictionary software for desktop PC that gives translations of words and phrases for different languages. It allows using several popular dictionary file formats simultaneously.

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

Features

• Supports multiple dictionary file formats, namely:
  • 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 abbreviations. 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 be referred to from .dsl files
• Uses WebKit layout engine for a more accurate articles' 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
• 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)
• 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
• Cross-platform: Linux/X11 and Windows + portable to others

Advantages and shortcomings

Compared to other similar software GoldenDict:

• Supports several popular dictionary file formats whereas Babylon and ABBYY Lingvo support only one (native) format and Stardict supports only two formats
• Use of WebKit layout engine allows displaying articles like web pages in a modern web browser which ABBYY Lingvo, StarDict and Babylon are unable of
• Current version (0.9.0) cannot perform full-text search inside articles of a dictionary. However, finding text in the currently displayed article is possible

See also

• Machine translation
• Comparison of machine translation applications
• StarDict
• Lingoes (a single click translation software)

External links

• Independent review in Linux Magazine
• Description of Goldendict 0.9 at Softpedia
• GoldenDict web site
• Download page
• Discussion forum (in English and Russian)
• Another discussion forum (in Russian)
• Collection of dictionaries to download (choose StarDict in download format).
• Files to read to learn how to create dictionaries in StarDict format: 1 and 2

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