Online (Comprehensive) English to Bengali Dictionary

Last week I was looking for a web based dictionary in the web. I found two sites with very poor collection of the word translation. (Details mentioned end of the article). At once I decided to give one whole night a try and create my own online dictionary. And guess what? I did.

How: After some googling, I got two good Unicode based dictionary databases. But none of them translate from English to Bengali. They were Bengali to English and Bengali to Bengali. Hmm.. they don't seem to be much useful, do they?

This is what I did: created my db schema, wrote a php code to parse and enter the entries of two dictionaries into one db table without any duplicates (Bengali and English translations strings into separate fields), wrote another php code to parse the English translation strings and do 'word indexing' and store indexes into another table. Then I created a search page. That's all, I'm done.

The search page searches in the indexed words, prioritize and sort them by their original positions in the translation strings and also categories the results. Works like a charm.

Try it now: www.ittefaq.com/dict.

I'll work on the application some more soon and will make a release. And yes, I do need to check the License types of the data sources :).

The other online dictionaries:

• www.virtualbangladesh.com/dictionary.php
• www.bangladict.org

These dictionaries are good starts but look dummy and not really useful.

I may make my dictionary open source soon.

Happy translating!