FreeDict is a project to provide truly free translation dictionaries for any use case scenario. I'm proud to announce that our dictionaries are now available for you as a "takeaway" using Aard2, a modern dictionary client for Android. In this article, I'm going to give an overview what has been done so far, where to get the dictionaries and how to install them.
At our FreeDict HackFest this year, we started working on getting our
dictionaries to a modern mobile platform. Since we are focusing on free and
open dictionaries, Android was a natural choice. The Aard project provides a
nice dictionary client, called
Aard2.
Aard2 uses the
slob format,
a binary format featuring nice formatting and compression.
There is already a converter from the
TEI format
(which is the format that FreeDict uses).
All the work left was to adjust tei2slob to our needs. Thanks to Karl Bartel
for
taking care of this. The adoption of slob also required a handful of changes to our
tooling and after quite some work, all
dictionaries are now available in the slob format.
Getting The Dictionaries
Our website still needs a general redesign, therefore I decided to provide a temporary download page with all the Aard dictionaries from FreeDict. The usage is very simple, just install Aard2 from the playstore or from F-Droid and download one of the slob dictionaries to your smartphone. Aard2 will take care of detecting the dictionary.
API Access
If you are fancy to make use of our data, you can simply integrate our API into your application. You can retrieve a list of dictionaries from either
http://freedict.org/freedict-database.xml
or
http://freedict.org/freedict-database.json
The releases of each dictionary section contains different platforms (as for instance dictd or slob) and the URL provides direct access to the dictionary file. Thinking long-term, it would be great to directly integrate our API into Aard2, so that users do not need to download dictionaries manually.
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