Hi FreeDict folks!
I’ve been a lurker on this mailing list for a while now so I thought I might go
ahead and introduce myself (as well as offer to help with the project). I’m
Tyler, a designer, developer, and language enthusiast currently based in the
Bay Area! I currently run the language learning platform Linguistic, and am a
huge fan of the work being done on the FreeDict project. There doesn’t seem to
be enough freely available bilingual data out on the Internet, so what the
project has managed to accomplish is truly stellar.
My software has actually started relying on FreeDict pretty heavily recently,
as it uses your dictionaries to help language learners better comprehend
vocabulary words during live conversation. As a result, I felt compelled to
reach out and see if I could help out in any way. I have an extensive academic
background in computer science and a good deal of UI/web design experience. I’m
also fairly proficient in Mandarin as well.
I was actually curious - I know CEDICT and ECDICT are two very popular Chinese
<> English dictionaries, and was wondering if their licensing would allow
FreeDict to offer Chinese dictionaries based on them. I could help port to TEI
if needed (though I think maybe PyGlossary can also do this…?). I saw they at
least support CEDICT. I was bummed to realize there were no Chinese
dictionaries on FreeDict.
And one final note – I’ve also developed a fully open-source dictionary file
format, that, unlike a lot of others, isn’t based on underlying HTML, as an
open spec, compiles to binary from an XML markup, and features a
case-insensitive entry lookup baked into its API. I’d love to help FreeDict
officially offer dictionaries in this format, as I’ve already written a repo
that converts the TEI source files into .odict binaries.
Anyway, just wanted to drop in and say hi to you all! Let me know if I can be
of assistance :)
Best,
Tyler Nickerson
Founder, Linguistic
https://www.golinguistic.com
