How to Defeat the Babylon Empire
Or: How to use a worthy alternative to Babylon Dictionary Software.
Babylon dictionary has been there for years,
It is definitely the best dictionary software I’ve ever seen.
Not surprisingly since it’s one of the oldest and Babylon Ltd.
really took a lot of effort with perfecting the software.
However, Babylon is not free, in fact, it is quite expensive.
It could get as high as 118$ for a lifetime license.
There’s also a monthly license but when will I ever NOT
need a dictionary in my lifetime?
It is very important to say that the lifetime license is only for
the current version of Babylon (8), and the upgrade costs
right about 60% of the lifetime license (wtf? seriously?).
So, as I do with 99.99% of my computer problems and/or the problems
of people surrounding me, I turn to Open Source for solutions.
Seeing as though I’m using Ubuntu, Babylon doesn’t work for me
anyways, at least not out of the box and I’m not an advocate of using
Wine to emulate your entire Windows software directory.
After some trial and error, I found that the best solution is GoldenDict
GoldenDict gave me everything I wanted, it’s simply an Open Sourced
(GPL Licensed) Â Dictionary Software that lets you download all the Babylon
Dictionaries and read them just like Babylon would.
However GoldenDict supports other dictionary formats, as well as
Audio files for dictionaries with Sound.
The only problem is that you really have to search for the dictionary files yourself.
No one really tells you where they are exactly or how to do this, so I’m going to give
you a little known fact: Babylon’s dictionaries are available for free.
This would probably change in the future, but every dictionary that you download
Babylon’s Free Dictionaries website, is an EXE file that you can extract with your
favorite Archive Extractor (may I recommend 7-zip?).
Inside the Archived EXE you’ll find a .BGL file, that’s the dictionary file.
This file alone is all the dictionary data you need, GoldenDict can handle that file
and present you the translation for every word you want as if it was Babylon.
Not only that, but many Android Apps (yes, other mobiles too I guess) support BGL
files now, so you can use those dictionaries anywhere, for free!
Enjoy.