Dictionaries

Contributing a dictionary to
If you have created a dictionary, please send an email to kvoctrain@ewald-arnold.de and tell me about it. I plan to collect pointers to those files and include them in this handbook. If I find an electronic abode for with enough space, I might also store them there.
But please:
Don't send me any files before telling me. Maybe someone else has already started this type of dictionary.
The dictionaries should have a reasonable good quality as I don't want to do any revision.
If you modify existing vocabularies or create vocabularies based on copyrighted material you must ask the author for permission. Even taking literal examples from schoolbooks might be problematic!

Other dictionaries on the web
If you are German an want to learn English (or vice versa) you can download the monthly vocabulary list provided by the German magazine Spotlight-Online.
The distribution contains an executable called spotlight2kvtml to transform those lists in kvtml format. The original files come as Word DOC-files so you have to save them as ANSI-TXT files before starting conversion. StarOffice or kword can do this job.
spotlight2kvtml needs the 3 parameters filename, month and year and produces a file in the same directory with the same name and the extension kvtml:
spotlight2kvtml 0199.txt 01 99
Thanks to a contribution by Andreas Neuper you can download files from Langenscheidt. This is a german site and contains files in several languages. This distribution contains his perl script langen2kvtml to transform those lists in kvtml format.
langen2kvtml needs only the original filename as parameter and tries to extract as much information as possible from the source file. For example is keeps the lesson names, conjugations and articles.
It produces a file in the same directory with the same name and the extension kvtml.
Dictionaries in ascii-format are for example available at:
ftp.uni- ulm.de/pub/misc/dict/english_german.tar.gz (approx. 350 kB)
ftp.gwdg.d e/pub/misc/dictionary/english/words.gz (approx. 1035 kB)
sable.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists
Dictionaries from the *Quick project in CSV format but encoded in UTF8 so you should have all characters rendered correctly. The files are available from its download section. They are in compressed .EXE format so you have to use unzip to extract the files.
If you know another source please tell me to include it here.

Translator applications
If you don't want to learn but just need quick translations of expressions in larger dictionaries you might be unhappy with if your computer doesn't have much memory and MHz. A 150000 entry file consumes about 60M and takes ages to load if your system is short of memory.
In this case you might want to try one of the following:
kdsing ().
steak/xsteak (console/X).
Ding (TCL).
qtrans ( 2.x).