I came across a post from June where someone was able to make a custom dictionary in languages not supported by Readlang. Though I find this fascinating, I don’t have the technical capacity on how to do this.
The reason I’m asking is whether there could be some system that would work seamlessly with dictionaries compiled by speakers dedicated to keeping their endangered language alive. I think would really help boost the efficacy of learning those languages and even draw in wider attention to these languages from people that don’t necessarily share the linguistic heritage in their ancestry.
Cherokee for example is one language that has an English dictionary available online. Would Readlang as it currently exists be able to tap into that dictionary? And though texts in Cherokee would be pretty scarce, having a compilation of texts that can readily be accessed would, again, help out these language revival movements enormously.
Right now I need Google Translate support in order to add a language. As soon as that is added for Cherokee I’ll be happy to add it to Readlang.
(It’s possible that I could drop the Google Translate requirement in future in cases where ChatGPT offers good support for the language, but even this isn’t possible at the moment.)
I can recommend the goldendict dictionary app as an alternative for quickly looking up words while you read, without the additional features of ReadLang like writing the translation directly into the translated text, creating flashcards etc.
goldendict is a desktop app for language nerds for simultaneous searching through multiple online and offline dictionaries and running custom scripts. I’ve used it heavily before ReadLang mostly replaced the need for dictionaries for me. I don’t know whether it’s also available on mobile.
You can set a keyboard shortcut to look up the translation of clipboard content. The steps would be:
add the online dictionary you’re talking about as a custom dictionary; if the translated word isn’t part of the url (address visible in the address bar of your browser after searching for a word doesn’t contain the word), drop me a DM with a link to the dictionary - maybe I can help, but please expect it’ll take some time
in the settings, set the keyboard shortcut you want to use for looking up words from the clipboard and activate the popup function
now as you read a text, select a word you want translated and press the keyboard shortcut
You could, in theory, add a script to goldendict that would help you curate flashcards and store them into a file that could be imported into e.g. ReadLang, but it wouldn’t be as smooth as ReadLang’s way (you’d have to copy and paste the context yourself), so I’m not sure it would be useful at all.