QStardict
Version: 1.2RC1 Web: http://bit.ly/QStardict
How long English will remain the world’s common language for international communication is questionable [says the Russian–Ed], but it has been the inspiration for many online dictionaries and translating services. But most of them share the same issue: once you’re offline, you lose access to a service and since the use of a translator suggests you might be abroad without any sort of the internet coverage, an app that doesn’t rely on remote connections would be helpful.
QStardict is a robust version of Stardict, one of the most popular open source offline dictionaries. In fact, QStardict just offers a GUI, and populating it with specific dictionaries is down to you. The application is compatible with various dictionary formats including DICT, XDXF (XML Dictionary Exchange Format) and Abby Lingvo. In many cases, you don’t need to purchase commercial dictionaries thanks to the broad choice of free and open source options around the web (see http://qstardict.ylsoftware. com/dictionaries.php). All you need to do is unpack the downloaded tarballs to ~/.stardict/dic and QStardict will automatically pick it up.
To use QStardict, you just type the word you want to know the meaning of and enjoy the instant results. It doesn’t matter what language you’re typing in, QStardict should guess the direction correctly without manual setup. The buttons below the search field are used to navigate through different entries, save word definitions to an external plain text file, print it and even show how to pronounce a word.
To hear how they are pronounced, you’ll need the Festival speech synthesiser, which should be available in standard repos of your Linux distro.
QStardict sits in the System Tray and can be easily invoked using the Ctrl+t keystroke. One of its most useful features is Scan, which is enabled by default. Setup your dictionaries, launch QStardict and minimise it to System Tray and return to a web browser, text editor or any other application with selectable text. When you hover your mouse over any word you’ll get an instant pop-up translation. This splendid capability can even help you learn foreign languages!
“Hover your mouse over any word to get an instant translation.”