Custom Chinese-English dictionary

[tshering]

Custom Chinese-English dictionary

As a side product of my Japanese-English dictionary (cf. Custom Japanese-English dictionary) I produced a Chinese-English dictionary based on CC-CEDICT.

Installation: In order to use this dictionary you need FW 2.3.1 or higher. Rename cedict4kobo.zip to dicthtml-ja.zip and copy it to .kobo\dict\ of the reader. Be aware that you will lose your Japanese definition dictionary by this. For a general description of the installation process, cf. New custom English dictionaries.

The reading experience will improve (auto selection of the dictionary) by changing the language of the epub from Chinese to Japanese.

I welcome feedback.

Edit: With more recent firmwares, the name of the Japanese dictionary has been changed to dicthtml-jaxxdjs.zip (instead of dicthtml-ja.zip).

[olderzeus]

Hi, I want to make a chinese dictionary, but error occurred when create chinese filename use unicode in penelope.py script.(also in windows and linux)

I modify penelope.py script to change filename's codepage and can create this file correct, but it can't used in kobo.

Can you tell me how did you make it?

[tshering]

I am not sure whether I can help you because I didn't use penelope and I don't know much about py.
One point is that the file name conventions for the Japanese dictionary (and therefore for the Chinese dictionary too) differ from the other dictionaries: if the word starts with (or consists in) a Chinese character the file name consists of only this one character. If however the word starts with something different (e.g full-width roman character) then the rules are the same as usual. I don't think penelope takes care of this. Therefore you might change the script accordingly or contact AlPe and ask whether he is interested in this. (Maybe he is rather following this thread than this one).
Second point: I don't think changing the codepage improves the situation.
Which dictionary do you want to convert? Is it better than the cedict?

[olderzeus]

I'm chinese, so I want make a dictionary include Chinese-Chinese and English-Chinese, I merge two stardict dictionary file to make it.

Thank you replay, I think I had error in build words files when use MARISA, I'll rebuild and test.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by olderzeus

I think I had error in build words files when use MARISA, I'll rebuild and test.

Good luck! If you gain new insights, please share them.

[olderzeus]

I give up...

I modify the penelope.py to use different code of file name, but still can not solve the problem.

[tshering]

Hi Olderzeus,

if you give more details we might be able to find a solution. There are not so many elements involved.
1) correct html files, containing the right dictionary entries, and having correct file names
2) correct compression of the html files in gzip format
3) correct marisa words file
4) correct packing of the html files and the words file into a zip file (position of words file is of importance)

at 3) Did you check with marisa tools (for instance with marisa-predictive-search) whether your words file is ok?
at 4) Did your zip tool use utf8 encoding for the file names? Cf. this post.

[olderzeus]

@tshering: Thank you for your reply.



According to the information you provided, I complete made my chinese-chinese dictionary successfully.

I made it by following steps:

1. using penelope.py to create all html files and gz compression from stardict file, also make words file. Because the file name and code of the problem, I do this step in Debian.

2. using 7z compressed all file to dicthtml-ja.zip, I do this step in windows. ( I use the same command line to made the compressed file in Debian, but the compressed file cannot be used in kobo, I don't kown why what happened )

[tshering]

Originally Posted by olderzeus

I complete made my chinese-chinese dictionary successfully.

Congratulations!

In a previous post you said

I want make a dictionary include Chinese-Chinese and English-Chinese, I merge two stardict dictionary file to make it.

I wonder why you merge the Chinese-Chinese dictionary with the English-Chinese. I would expect that you merge the English-English dictionary with the English-Chinese dictionary. The only thing I can think of is that you read bilingual books.

[olderzeus]

I initially thought that the Chinese-Chinese dictionary can be used in Kobo like default English dictionary, the result is not so.

As a Chinese, there are also some chinese characters don't recognition , especially the pronunciation.

So, I want to make a dictionary include Chinese-Chinese and English-Chinese. When reading with English books, this dictionary can translate some English words to Chinese, And when reading Chinese books, can also consult some rare characters or word pronunciation and meaning.

About merge the English-English dictionary with the English-Chinese dictionary, here some stardict dictionary file like Oxford English-Chinese is already included English-English and English-Chinese.

Btw. here anyway can rename dicthtml-ja.zip as dicthtml.zip to direct used in kobo?

[tshering]

Originally Posted by olderzeus

About merge the English-English dictionary with the English-Chinese dictionary, here some stardict dictionary file like Oxford English-Chinese is already included English-English and English-Chinese.

This seems to be very convenient.

Originally Posted by olderzeus

Btw. here anyway can rename dicthtml-ja.zip as dicthtml.zip to direct used in kobo?

No, this does not work. But if you set the language of a book to Japanese, then dicthtml-ja.zip will become the default dictionary for this book. The language is set in the .opf file in the metadata section:

<dc:language>ja</dc:language>

[Ansileran]

Hi!

I was wondering if your Chinese-English dictionary would work on the Aura HD. I do not own a Kobo device yet so I don't know much about using them but I want to upgrade my reader and one of my prerequisites is that I can use a Chinese-English (or French or German) dictionary in it so that I do not have to pick up my phone each time... On the Aura thread, they told me that, since Chinese is not a supported language, I wouldn't be able to use a Chinese dictionary. Is that true?

Thanks

[tshering]

Originally Posted by Ansileran

Hi!

I was wondering if your Chinese-English dictionary would work on the Aura HD. I do not own a Kobo device yet so I don't know much about using them but I want to upgrade my reader and one of my prerequisites is that I can use a Chinese-English (or French or German) dictionary in it so that I do not have to pick up my phone each time... On the Aura thread, they told me that, since Chinese is not a supported language, I wouldn't be able to use a Chinese dictionary. Is that true?

Thanks

Chinese is not supported on any Kobo reader. So the Aura is not different in this regard. You can disguise the Chinese dictionary as a Japanese dictionary to make it work (see the first post in this thread).

[mattington]

Cheers for the Chinese dictionary! Pretty annoying that Kobo doesn't support adding new dictionaries and that you have to hack it this way, but great for those of us who read in Mandarin.

As for feedback - it seems I can only look up a single character at a time in the dictionary (Kobo 6" running 3.3.0), but in Chinese very often words are combinations of two characters. For instance, 小 means 'little', 心 means 'heart', but together 小心 means 'careful'. If I looked up each individually I'd have no idea what the word actually meant! Any way that you know of to select two characters and look them up as a pair? Does your dictionary have paired characters?

[tshering]

Originally Posted by mattington

Cheers for the Chinese dictionary! Pretty annoying that Kobo doesn't support adding new dictionaries and that you have to hack it this way, but great for those of us who read in Mandarin.

As for feedback - it seems I can only look up a single character at a time in the dictionary (Kobo 6" running 3.3.0), but in Chinese very often words are combinations of two characters. For instance, 小 means 'little', 心 means 'heart', but together 小心 means 'careful'. If I looked up each individually I'd have no idea what the word actually meant! Any way that you know of to select two characters and look them up as a pair? Does your dictionary have paired characters?

Sorry for the late response. Yes, the dictionary includes words consisting of several characters. The problem is to select the word on the screen.

Here is an example of the content:

中专 [zhong1 zhuan1] /vocational secondary school/technical secondary school/trade school/abbr. for 中等專科學校|中等专科学校/
中世紀 [zhong1 shi4 ji4] /medieval/Middle Ages/
中世纪 [zhong1 shi4 ji4] /medieval/Middle Ages/
中东 [Zhong1 dong1] /Middle East/
中举 [zhong4 ju3] /to pass the provincial level imperial examination/
中乐透 [zhong4 le4 tou4] /to win at the lottery/
中亚 [Zhong1 Ya4] /Central Asia/
中亚细亚 [Zhong1 Ya4 xi4 ya4] /Central Asia/
中亚草原 [Zhong1 Ya4 cao3 yuan2] /Central Asian grasslands/