[Please note that some of the entries are very old.*]

Thursday, 7 July 2011

Dictionaries and Dictionaries

"CafeTran offers a flexible interface to access and update your dictionaries in the workflow", it says in the CafeTran Handbook. It continues to distinguish between dictionaries and glossaries, and how to integrate a dictionary into CT.

All very well, but when I tried to integrate my main dictionary like I integrated an Internet resource, it didn't work. It turns out that the term "dictionary" applies to wordlists, very similar to glossaries, but not to software dictionaries. Apparently, there are dictionaries and dictionaries.

Mac OS comes to the rescue. With Services, you can easily link your dictionaries to CT. In the menu bar, go to CafeTran>Services>Services Preferences...
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Choose or add your dictionary. In my case, that's Van Dale. Assign a keyboard shortcut to the dictionary, Ctrl+v, in this case.
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Next time you want to look up a word in CT, just double-click it, hit the shortcut, and magically and revolutionarily, your preferred dictionary shows up with the word you selected.
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Pretty neat.