Using Dictionary Unifier on Mac OS X

After searching and wading through various websites and using alternate search engines, I managed to find a way to add extra dictionaries to Mac OS’s default dictionary. The default languages are English & Japanese. Other languages can, however, be added. Finding these dictionaries is a bit of a hassle, but that depends on the language pair(s) that you work with. This blog post explains how to add Chinese dictionaries.

To do this, you can useDictUnifier, a great little tool that helps setup your dictionaries to Mac OS. It can be downloaded here:

http://code.google.com/p/mac-dictionary-kit/

 

Download it and install it to any location, or simply put it in your Apps directory

 

 

 

Once the DictUnifier program is setup in your Applications directory, open it and drag the .ifo file of the dictionary you wish to add to the Mac OS Dictionary.

The version stated earlier works with Mac OS X Lion, but there are older versions that work on older versions of Mac OS, namely 10.6.

 

The software then prompts you to give a name to your dictionary. I used shortened names, since I have added quite a few specialized dictionaries (Medical, Chinese Idioms, Fojiao et cetera …

Click start and the .ifo dictionary chosen is added to the default Dictionary App. It can take some time, depending on the size of the dictionary, but be patient. Again, this is a fine little application. I haven’t tested it yet with the French to English dictionaries, but will do so as soon as I can find the more decent and modern dictionaries. Hoping to find a Robert-Collins Fr-En dictionary soon.

The next step should be as follows.

Again, this takes time, but the program is running Perl and other scripts in the background.

The next step is to setup your dictionary in the preferences pane

Test it out!