NorwegianToEnglishDict

Original Reddit thread

Since I couldn't find ANY decent NO>EN Kindle dictionary, much less a dictionary that supports inflections, I decided to roll my own.

I cobbled together some projects, made some scripts and the results are Norwegian Bokmål/Nynorsk to English dictionaries that are using the database from Wiktionary(which is very decent) and support inflections.

Do not be surprised at the Kindle-specific esoteric workarounds used in this project - in the words of Amazon support: "Dictionary features are not used often so they are not a priority"

Preview: Kindle4PC[0.13], Kindle[0.12], Kindle[0.1]

Changelog

Downloads

Current version: 0.16 (2018-09-21)

• Norwegian Bokmål (nb-NO>EN)
  • .mobi dictionary - This is what you want for your e-reader. For Kindle just drop it in ../documents/dictionaries/
  • .txt which contains dictionary entries
  • .inf which contains inflections
• Norwegian Nynorsk (nn-NO>EN)
  • .mobi dictionary - This is what you want for your e-reader. For Kindle just drop it in ../documents/dictionaries/
  • .txt which contains dictionary entries
  • .inf which contains inflections
• Norwegian Bokmål+Nynorsk to EN
  • #TODO

Notice: When updating to a newer version of a dictionary, restart (NOT RESET) your Kindle after copying it, or you will run into bugs like this or this. This is due to a decade old firmware bug that was not fixed yet, if you want it fixed, call Amazon support and tell them about it. They seem to think people don't use dictionary features that much, prove them wrong.

FAQ

• How do I use this on Kindle for PC?
  • Follow steps in this thread.
• Formatting could be better
  • Am aware. I plan on making it prettier + including all the inflected forms in the definition. TODO.
• There is a missing/incorrect word definition!
  • The word is most likely missing on Wiktionary. Add it there or at least add it as a request here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Requested_entries_(Norwegian)
  • It may have been added to Wiktionary since the last update of my dictionary.
  • If you are sure it is neither, it might be an issue with the Wiktionary parser I am using or with one of my scripts. Tell me about it!
• Could you do an EN>NO dictionary too?
  • No, I have no interest in doing so.
• I can't use Kindle search bar to search in this dictionary!
  • This is a Kindle-specific issue, read the linked Reasoning below for a workaround.
• The dictionary doesn't register as a Norwegian one, I have to manually select it per book!
  • This is on purpose, both dictionaries are marked as en-us>en-us otherwise it is impossible to search through them via the Dictionary search function on Kindle. Reasoning
• Known issues
  • "var" shows the entry for "vår" etc. This is a Kindle firmware issue and I can't do anything to fix it. Call up Amazon.
  • Genitive forms are not in the dictionary. For example "verdens".

Dev notes

UpdateEverything.sh is the script to execute to generate the dictionary, it'll run all the needed subscripts.

Resulting dictionaries are going to end up in 4_finalDictionary.

First the script runs index.js in 1_wordlists via node to generate a list of words to scrap.

Then it runs scrap.py from the root folder which scraps the whole wordlist into separate .json files. This will take an hour or two, and has a bug - seems like from time to time wiktionary fails to load(?) and the entry for that word just does not get scrapped.

• You need to change the venv in scrap.py to one of your own and have wiktionaryparser installed in the venv through pip.

virtualenv wikivirtpython
source ~/wikivirtpython/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade wiktionaryparser

Then it runs json2txt_inf.php in 3_definitionsAndInflections, which is a PHP script that processes the scrapped .json files and turns them into definition(.txt) and inflection(.inf) files.

Then it runs makemobi.sh in 4_finalDictionary, which runs some tests to detect broken unicode(shouldn't happen), cats the .inf and .txt files from 3_definitionsAndInflections, runs tab2opf.py which is an old modified Python2 script to generate .html and .opf files. Finally it runs kindlegen.exe through WINE against the .opf files to generate the final .mobi dictionary.

If a connected Kindle is detected, it'll copy the .mobi files on it too.

License

Everything unless mentioned otherwise is licensed under AGPLv3. That is everything but index.js responsible for wordlist generation(MIT), the wordlist , inflection list and definition list(whatever license Wiktionary uses), tab2opf(GPLv3+) and kindlegen/mobigen binaries(proprietary I assume).