Home Home
Sign up | Login

Deprecation notice: openSUSE Lizards user blog platform is deprecated, and will remain read only for the time being. Learn more...

Rossana Motta

I'm italian, lived for most time of my life in italy, just a short time in Germany and then one year in the gray U.K. before moving to the U.S. Been in Tallahassee FL since August '06. After a bachelor and a master degree in Biomedical Engineering, i finally realized that Biomedical stuff was not really my "cup of tea" so 8 days after the master graduation i took my butt off, changed country, work field, life.. (it took me 8 days because that was needed for the huge book burning). Moved to Computer Science, and did never regret. What else... hmm, i feel stoopid when i have to fill up "Biographical" fields... Well, i spend more time in gyms, stadium tracks, swimming pools and such than in my living room (reason: i get bored in the living room). The sport i enjoyed the most was Athletics, specifically pole vault (3 broken bones were well worth). Even if i'm italian i'm terrible at cooking (if i attempt to use cookers, i can burn the water! the fire alarm is my personal kitchen timer). So in case you're after italian recipes, dont ask me! I ain't gonna ever post a blog about recipes lol

Author Archive

Converting Babylon Dictionaries to Stardict Format in OpenSuse

June 14th, 2008 by

This blog does not add any information to the documentation you can find around. Anyway, it is not too long since someone was able to make Babylon dictionaries usable by software other than the proprietary Babylon application. And they have been trying for years… so it has not been a trivial step 🙂

If you do not know Stardict, you can get it from Yast. This is the official site.

A few dictionaries are also linked – ready and free to use – at Stardict website. However, I used Babylon when I was a Windows user and i have to admit that their dictionaries remain unbeaten. Matters not what language you want, mono-language or bi-language, technical, general purpose etc etc… they just rock!

You can get tons of dictionaries for free from Babylon website:

Now, go to Yast Software Manager and search for dictconv. Alternatively, you can install from source (which is what I personally did).

Installing is very easy: ./configure and then make all install

Now you’re all set. To use it to convert:

cd to the directory where you have the .BGL dictionaries and type: dictconv INPUT_FILENAME.BGL -o OUTPUT_FILENAME.ifo

Pay attention to the extension: must be .ifo. This will generate 3 files for each BGL dictionary: .ifo, .idx, .dict

Place all these 3 files in /usr/share/stardict/dic/ creating a separate folder for each dictionary. Then rebook Stardict and go to Manage Dictionary (bottom right): there you can select what comes first, activate or deactivate etc etc

Nothing difficult but def worth, and not only for non native speakers.. there are lots of technical terminology Babylon dictionaries that may well come handy.

Notice that with Stardict you can also implement Pronunciations of the typed words: see Stardict site: “WyabdcRealPeopleTTS package make StarDict pronounce English words. It is just many .wav files. Extract(tar -xjvf) the tarball at /usr/share/”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sooo well… Have fun ~ Buon divertimento ~ Viel Spaß ~ I que te diviertas ~ Maak plezier ~ ha så roligt [hmm i’m just hoping the dictionaries mentioned just above are not making me do some poor figure for these few transations of “Have Fun”.. cuz i have no idea for any language except Italian :D]