Dictionaries

Dictionaries are what allows you to click words in the Reader and see their meaning or translation:

The Inventory screen shows all of your downloaded or imported dictionaries, with any dictionaries currently active in the Reader indicated by the green arrow. Next to the dictionary's language pair, the number of words defined by that dictionary is shown in parenthesis:

To remove a dictionary, click the close button next to the dictionary to be removed. You will be prompted to confirm prior to its deletion.

The dictionaries that SynchroTales prompts you to download when you first click on a token are intended to cover as much of the provided text as possible, however certain words may still be undefined for a number of reasons. When no definition exists in the dictionary for a particular word, rather than the definition you will see an overlay like this:

In the example, no German-English entry for the word "Gregor" exists in the dictionary (it is common for proper nouns to be absent from the provided dictionaries).

If it is important for you to have definitions available for particular words, there are a couple things you can do:

• See if you can help get the words added to the SynchroTales dictionaries
• Create a custom dictionary with the vocabulary you need

Custom Dictionaries

SynchroTales allows importing custom dictionaries which are acquired elsewhere. To import a custom dictionary, select the import button at the top right of the Dictionaries card on the Inventory screen:

You will be instructed to select a JSON file containing the dictionary information. The provided dictionary must match the format of the following example in order for the import to succeed (extra fields are ignored):

{
    "name": "My Custom Dictionary",
    "from": "es",
    "to": "en",
    "map": {
        "hola": ["hello", "hi"],
        "adiós": ["goodbye", "farewell"]
    }
}

Here is an explanation of each field:

• name: this is the name that will show up for the dictionary in the Inventory screen.
• from: ISO language code for the target language. Words to be definied should be in this language.
• to: ISO language code for the reference language. Definitions should be written in this language.
• map: an object containing string key words to be defined, and string array values for the definitions.

Only one dictionary is allowed per language pair, so make sure it includes all of the words you need! Currently, custom dictionaries are limited to containing simple lists of definitions for each word, but part-of-speech and pronunciation information for custom dictionaries will be supported in the future.