Question

I want to create a Eng<->Rus dictionary application. As far as I know, I need to use SQLite. But how can I implement the translation function? How can I find corresponding translation of the word requested by the user? Any help, guidance, tutorials will be appreciated.

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeDict has a good collection of bilingual dictionaries, including eng-rus. It’s under GPL.

If you need only eng->rus translation, this is basically a hashtable, where the english word is the key, and the list of corresponding russian words are the value.

If you need bidirectional translation, I would store each word as follows:

[word], [language], [set of corresponding translations]

The translation is easy then: you lookup the word W in language L, and return the set of possible translations.

You may want to have a look here too How do I initialize a store with default data in a CoreData application?

Also, it’s probably a good thing to add some non-aggressive stemming and/or normalization, so that if I search for a plural (ie. eggs) it’s resolved to the singular, or if I search a specific verbal form (ie. walking) it’s resolved to the verb’s infinitive.