One of the Amazon Kindle features that I love the most is the built-in dictionary that lets you easily look up definitions for almost every word in any book. Since Kindle allows you to install and change dictionary that is used for lookups you could look up pretty much everything, including translations. There were some English-Russian dictionaries in circulation for some time but they weren’t perfect.
First, most of them used Cyrillic letters. This means that users need to install Unicode Font Hack in order to use it (and not everyone is willing to do that).
Second, these dictionaries lacked support for word forms. So you could look up the translation of word “read”, but if you were to move your cursor to word “reading” there would be nothing.
We decided that it’s about time to fix that. We’ve compiled “English-Russian Dictionary with Transcriptions” that you can now download from Amazon Kindle Store, install and use for word lookups. This dictionary has over 55,000 words in more than 250,000 different forms which gives it much better coverage than freeware dictionaries available elsewhere. We used transliteration for Russian words so that this dictionary could be used without replacing default Kindle fonts.
Hopefully some day Amazon will install Unicode fonts on Amazon Kindle so no hacking would be needed and we could publish this dictionary with proper Cyrillic letters. But for transliteration is the way to go.
Several of my friends tested this dictionary and they couldn’t be happier about the ease with which they could read English books, learn new words and improve their language skills.
If you are a native Russian speaker who likes to read English books on Kindle but needs to looks a translation of some word on a occasion – this book is for you! People who are learning Russian will also find it useful. Learn how to open WPS file and how to open AAE file.
My first thoughts upon reading this post were that I am willing to pay for the dictionary (I have a Russian-English dictionary installed without word forms). But I have a Kindle with font hack (and won’t be installing 2.5 firmware until/unless there is a font hack for it). With the fonts present, I will feel that transliteration hinders my reading experience. So I won’t be ordering one for now.
If there was a place where I could purchase a proper version with russian in cyrillics, I would do that.
Are you planning to release a version of this dictionary without transliteration?
My gut filling is that most of its target audience has font hack installed already, and would prefer to read Russian text in Cyrillic.
The problem with Cyrillic dictionary is that Amazon DTP doesn’t allow to publish books with Non-Latin characters.
I’m currently working on making the Cyrillic version available somehow.
I’m interested in a Russian-English dictionary that would work with the Cyrillic Unicode hack. I know that I would not be able to search in Cyrillic, but it would work when reading Russian books to look up words.
Probably, Amazon doesn’t want to commit to non-latin characters because they would be hard pressed to deal with the keyboard.
Any progress on Cyrillic version of the dictionary?
Is it possible/easier to do for Kindle 3?
I’m torn between this one (with forms) and free Miller (without forms).
Dmitry,
Cyrillic dictionary is our top priority right now. Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t accept books with non-latin characters at the moment because they are not supported on older Kindle devices. Perhaps at some time in the future when 3.0 software would be pushed to all Kindle devices it would be possible. Once it is we’ll surely publish it and announce on the blog.
How to make this dictionary default on Kindle for Ipad?