Searching Multiple Online Dictionaries

[gglick]

I'm a translator, and I use several online dictionaries to look up and verify lots of different terms throughout my workday. Is there a way to make a workflow that can search all these dictionaries at once and return the results in Alfred? If there is, that alone would be worth the price of the Powerpack to me (as of now I'm still just using the free version).

[jdfwarrior]

I'm a translator, and I use several online dictionaries to look up and verify lots of different terms throughout my workday. Is there a way to make a workflow that can search all these dictionaries at once and return the results in Alfred? If there is, that alone would be worth the price of the Powerpack to me (as of now I'm still just using the free version).

 

Would OneLook.com solve something like this? I started making a search workflow for OneLook.com the other day and just kinda threw it out. I made it just to show it off to someone else. They are asking me to finish it now. Just curious as to whether it would fit that need.

[gglick]

Unfortunately not, as I'm a Japanese-English translator and OneLook.com (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any Japanese dictionaries. I also frequently search Google and Wikipedia as well, so ideally I'd like to be able to search all of those in one shot.

[jdfwarrior]

Unfortunately not, as I'm a Japanese-English translator and OneLook.com (as far as I can tell) doesn't have any Japanese dictionaries. I also frequently search Google and Wikipedia as well, so ideally I'd like to be able to search all of those in one shot.

 

Ah cool. Um, I'm not aware of any currently available workflows that allow this, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. Can you provide a list of resources you would typically use and I can look into and see how tough it would be to create something like that.

[psistorm]

To play around with Alfreds new possibilities, I recently created a workflow (here) allowing the translation of german-english words using the online dictionary http://leo.dict.org and feeding back the results to Alfred. I am sure this approach could easily be used searching multiple dictionaries (XPath), when the sites that should be searched are known. Even better (easier) it would be if the sites provide an API or WebService.

Perhaps I'll have time on the weekend to provide some sort of helper for parsing pages in this style.

Edited March 19, 2013 by psistorm

[gglick]

Sure. Here are the dictionaries and sources I use most often:

 

ALC: http://www.alc.co.jp

Weblio: http://ejje.weblio.jp

Glosbe: http://en.glosbe.com/ja/en/

 

Searching those three all at once would be awesome, but if there were a way to include the following as well, it would be the proverbial icing:

 

Google

Japanese Names: http://kanji.reader.bz

Google Translate

Wikipedia (both JP and EN sites)

 

If it helps, it's trivial to set all these up as custom web searches in Alfred already. I'm just looking for a way to search them all simultaneously, preferably with the results fed back to Alfred where I can then scroll through and select the one that seems most promising.

[jdfwarrior]

Sure. Here are the dictionaries and sources I use most often:

 

ALC: http://www.alc.co.jp

Weblio: http://ejje.weblio.jp

Glosbe: http://en.glosbe.com/ja/en/

 

Searching those three all at once would be awesome, but if there were a way to include the following as well, it would be the proverbial icing:

 

Google

Japanese Names: http://kanji.reader.bz

Google Translate

Wikipedia (both JP and EN sites)

 

If it helps, it's trivial to set all these up as custom web searches in Alfred already. I'm just looking for a way to search them all simultaneously, preferably with the results fed back to Alfred where I can then scroll through and select the one that seems most promising.

 

Lol so I was going to look at these sites and see if they had an api or something that I could dig through and make a script filter that I could search them all and provide the results in Alfred but then realized they are .jp sites. I'm a redneck from the south and can't read japanese Um.. would a workflow that would open 3 tabs to all three sites at once suffice? 

[gglick]

Hmm. It's not ideal, but that could still be faster than querying the same term in each site separately, even via custom searches.

And yeah, I guess this can't be the easiest workflow to put together if you can't read Japanese, but unfortunately I can't code or script, so