Posts Tagged ‘hack’

Add Your Local Language Dictionary to iPhone

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

1.You must install weDict first by either iBrickr or Installer.

2.Then download the dictionary in your language from startdict.

For me, I downloaded the oxford-gb dictionary(en – zh_CN) 牛津现代英汉双解词典(click to download). And the file I got is stardict-oxford-gb-2.4.2.tar.bz2.

3.Now unzip the .bz2 file by winrar, which is the one I take, or any other uncompress software you prefer.

Three files extracted: oxford-gb.idx, oxford-gb.ifo,oxford-gb.dict.dz.

4.Re-unzip the .dz file by the freeware 7zip to a .dict one. WinRar can’t do this for you.

5.Copy the .idx and .dict files to iPhone’s /var/root/Library/weDict/ by WinSCP or Putty.

6.Launch weDict and enjoy! :-)

weDict with Oxford-Chinese dictionary

Update: for the most recent weDict version 0.5, in order to make the newly added dictionary work, you have to manually choose the dictionary first(which is not necessary in the previous version).You can get it by checking the following picture out.

weDict dict pick-up

One more thing,if you use WinScp to copy the dict files to iPhone, make sure you copy them to the right place, because WinScp’s default folder for iphone is very similar to the right folder. Again, see the picture, please.

right folder for weDict

Update(Feb 12,2008): If you are in firmware 1.1.3 and weDict can’t work any more, you may check out George’s fix as quoted below. There’s lots of other fixes here.

weDict stores the dictionary index cache in /var/root/Library/weDict, if for some reason this folder was not created (which is my case), apply the following fix:

mkdir /var/mobile/Library/weDict

chown mobile /var/mobile/Library/weDict

ln -s /var/mobile/Library/weDict /var/root/Library/.

Update(Jul.10,2008): I’ve uploaded the oxford ready-for-iphone dict files here(click to download). Download and unzip it to your local disk, then copy the two dict files to the right folder on the phone. Launch wedict and enjoy.

Update(Sep.26,2008): Currently the dictionary files you copied to the wedict folder are NOT always avaiable. Check out the details on the comments of this post here.