Monday, July 7, 2014

Add a German-English Dictionary To Your Android Kindle App

android-kindle-dictionary

After writing a tutorial on how to enable a German-English dictionary on the Kindle app for iPad and iPhone , today I’d like to share with you today how to enable the same functionality on your Android Kindle app.

The process is a kind of a “hack”, i.e. you will have to work with the phone’s internal file structure, but the process is relatively simple, virtually danger-free and no rooting is required.

Download the Standard German-German Dictionary

While opening any German book in your Kindle app, long-press on a word to get the dictionary popup. If you haven’t downloaded the standard German-German dictionary yet, you will prompted to do so. Just tap “Download” and wait a few moments.

After installing the standard German-German dictionary, you will be able to tap any words in your books and get a German explanation of the vocabulary. For beginners and intermediate learners, this will not be very helpful. This is why we’re going to replace the standard German-German dictionary with a German-English dictionary in the next step.

android-kindle-dictionary android-kindle-app-dictionary

before download (left) and after download (right)

Replace The German-German Dictionary With a German-English Dictionary

For the next step, we’re going to need to download a dictionary from somewhere. As usual, I recommend this site [1] as a starting point where you can get (not perfect) but free dictionaries. Look for where it says German -> English (or click here [2] ) to download the dictionary to your computer.

After having downloaded your new dictionary, connect your Android device to your computer. Note: You could do all of this process directly on your phone as well by using an app such as ES File explorer [3] , but for now I’ll show how to do it in Windows Explorer.

1. Navigate to the Kindle App Folder on Your Android Device

Depending on how your device is set-up you’ll find the Kindle app data under Internal storage/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/ or sdcard/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files.

2. Look For A Folder With The Name B003YL4LVQ

Once you’re in the Kindle App folder of your Android device, look for a folder with the name B003YL4LVQ. This is the folder where the standard German-German dictionary is stored. The actual filename of the German dictionary is B003YL4LVQ_EBOK.prc

kindle-android-german-dictionary

2. Copy The German-English Dictionary Into The App Folder

copying-dictionary

3. Change The Filenames Of the Old And The New Directory (IMPORTANT!)

In this step, we’re going to trick the Android Kindle app into thinking that our new German-English dictionary is actually the old German-German one. In order to do this, we simply swap the filenames. As you can see below, I’ve changed B003YL4LVQ_EBOK.prc to B003YL4LVQ_EBOK.prcOLD and German-English.mobi to B003YL4LVQ_EBOK.prc.

Windows will complain that “the file may become unusable” but you can just ignore that and click “Yes”.

renaming-kindle-dictionary

Enjoy Your New German-English Dictionary

Now you should be able to tap on German words and get the the English translation. Below I’ve added a few screenshot of our new German-English dictionary in action. Simply tap a word to get the translation. By tapping on “Full Definition” in the popup you can get read the whole dictionary entry and get more information about individual words.

android-german-english-dictionary android-kindle-dict-german android-kindle-dict-example

German-English dictionary installed and working on Android Kindle app

Links
  1. ^ this site (blog.mikeasoft.com)
  2. ^ here (mikeasoft.com)
  3. ^ ES File explorer (play.google.com)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Search This Blog