original dictionaries – where to buy?

[rrh]

Hi,

You can download many dictionaries, but they're many times corrupted – be it wrong encoding or, generally – without audio. As fair use applies to such files in my country, I can use them kind of legally. But I’d like to have full-featured and professionally made ones.

The app such as GoldenDict has changed my life and workflow. Really. Looking up words and phrases has never been easier. But it’s only an interface to dictionaries. But they are scarce…

I’m interested in as many English-English dictionaries as there are out there. Now I have OALD8, Collins Cobuild5 and LDOCE5. But frankly speaking, I do not know where they come from! How one could convert them? I often spent many hours of searching for them. Many of them were of poor quality. I haven’t even been able to find converters!

Where is the problem? Is it publishers who are reluctant to open their formats? It’s ridiculous to have many interfaces – and of course you have to have Windows!

How could I make my dictionaries ‘legal’? I do not want to have half-products – without audio, with corrupted entities and problems with encoding.

What do you suggest?

[chulai]

Hi,

You can download many dictionaries, but they're many times corrupted – be it wrong encoding or, generally – without audio. As fair use applies to such files in my country, I can use them kind of legally. But I’d like to have full-featured and professionally made ones.

You have described the problems I have been experiencing too. In my experience the converters usually are not good enough. That's why the resulting dictionaries have encoding errors and other corruptions.

The app such as GoldenDict has changed my life and workflow. Really. Looking up words and phrases has never been easier. But it’s only an interface to dictionaries. But they are scarce…

I’m interested in as many English-English dictionaries as there are out there. Now I have OALD8, Collins Cobuild5 and LDOCE5. But frankly speaking, I do not know where they come from! How one could convert them? I often spent many hours of searching for them. Many of them were of poor quality. I haven’t even been able to find converters!

There are a lot of dictionaries out there. Most of them Babylon BGL, Stardict formats and Lingvo DSL. The problems are that:
* Stardict dictionaries are usually converted very badly from Babylon files.
* Babylon files don't have sound files because the program chose to support Text-To-Speech instead.

Where is the problem? Is it publishers who are reluctant to open their formats? It’s ridiculous to have many interfaces – and of course you have to have Windows!

Yes, usually the publishers sell their dictionary contents along with the software to read it. Exceptions are the licensed premium contents for Babylon and ABBY Lingvo software.

How could I make my dictionaries ‘legal’? I do not want to have half-products – without audio, with corrupted entities and problems with encoding.

What do you suggest?

No idea, really. Personally I have found that the best dictionaries are in Lingvo format usually with sounds and images too. Then come Babylon dictionaries. Stardict files are very poor in my opinion.