Onyx in multiple languages

Hey!

I would like to use google translate (which supports a wide range of languages very well), I don’t want to use the current integration with google translate the reader application, for two reasons:

1 - currently the dictionary options don’t support the language I need (polish)
2 - The current google translate integration needs internet access.
2.1 - Anyways this option also doesn’t support the language I need.
2.2 - Even if it did, I want to do this in the train and I don’t want to turn my hotspot on, or use a lot of battery from both my onyx and my smart phone.
2.3 - Additionally the google translate app allows you to download languages offline, that could be leveraged.
3 - No reinventing the wheel, so I do believe that the android capabilities in integrating different apps should be leveraged if possible, hence I would like to use the google translate app directly from the reader app.

What I really would like to have:

  • I would like to use the google translate app for translation from one language to another, and use other richer dictionary apps. I don’t know what can be done here for the sake of integration, but I do believe you guys should really try to leverage existing proven solutions if doable.

What I am currently trying to do instead (which also doesn’t work):
1 - Copy the polish text from a book, for example.
2 - Use the navigation ball to open google translate.
3 - paste the text to google translate. Here it fails, polish specific characters are not pasted correctly, making using that solution too laboring to be viable.

Independently of anything, I would like the copy-paste solution to work with polish characters.

Regards,
Eberli

Hi Eberli

For example, you can download custom dictionaries from this page:
http://download.huzheng.org/

To install them, just unpack the archive and copy the directory into your dicts directory under storage. After restarting the dictionary app you should be able to use them offline.

Kind regards
Erik

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Hey,

I found two PL-EN dictionaries there, one of them is working (stardict-kosciuszko), the other one yields “Load failed” in the dictionary (oxford).
The one that works performs very poorly and it is not complete when it comes to declensions of words in polish (the same word takes many many forms) and doesn’t find the dictionary entries often enough (google translate app does) .

Secondly and most important, when the words have special polish characters, it replaces them with another character and hence doesn’t find the correspondent word in the dictionary (independent of word declension). For example, if I select the word “książka” in a book, the dict app ends up looking for “ksiouka”, never finding the entry.

I did find a PDF document where it doesn’t not replace the special characters when looking for the words, but in that one strangely, the reader fails to automatically select a full word, splitting in the special characters in most cases it seems.

So 3 issues:

  • replacing special characters when looking for entries in the dictonaries.
  • In the copy paste of text (as described before) it also happens.
  • in some PDFs, it fails to recognize a full word when special characters are present.

Regards,
Eberli.

I use 5 dictionaries: Longman, Oxford, Duden, freedict eng-deu, freedict deu-eng and to be honest I have no performance issues. To help the Onyx support to investigate the problem you should provide the download link of the dictionary that causes performance issues.

But I can confirm problems with umlauts and special chars. It seems that the used font does not support all relevant UTF-8 characters. This must be fixed! Also the font should be scalable in smaller steps. 10 is too small and 15 too big.

By the way, the built-in-dictionary supports stardict, bgl and mdict. Maybe you will find some dictionary in another format that works better for Polish.


I just noticed another problem with the dictionary: The order of the preferred dictionaries is ignored. For example when using those two dictionaries in this order as preferred dictionaries:

Then the dictionary will still show me the result of the second dictionary first, but will highlight the first dictionary instead. I can not tap on the highlighted result to get the expected result. I have to switch to the second dictionary first and then I can switch back to the first dictionary to update the result.


To summarize this, we have four issues with the dictionary:

  • Special chars and German umlauts are not or incorrectly shown
  • There are some performance issues with dictionaries that contains special chars (like the mentioned Polish one)
  • The order of the preferred dictionaries is ignored
  • The steps between the font sizes is too big

@Eberli

You can try Babylon dictionaries. Maybe they suit you better. I just wrote an HowTo that may help you:

1 Like

Hey @hazington, thanks!

I will check those. And I guess I will have to wait until they fix the character encoding issues though, till then I will not bother myself with those problems and use other resources all together.

Regards,
Eberli