Database, Spanish/English words, reasonably priced?

April 15, 2012 4:21 PM

I'm looking for a Spanish/English translation dictionary in electronic table/database format. I'm trying to make what's basically an online dictionary, and I need an actual dictionary for the site to query. My Googling only turned up one database costing ~$4000. Are there cheaper options?
posted by sninctown to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Looks like Project Gutenberg has a Spanish-English-Tagalog dictionary (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20738). You'd need to do some scripting to convert the data to a usable format, but it should be easy enough to do from a plain text or HTML source.

The dictionary itself is in Spanish and appears to be from 1915. Whether or not you find this useful would depend on your needs for contemporary vocabulary and how large you need the word set to be. If you're looking for more, I'd imagine that there are other electronic dictionary choices that could be converted to what you're looking for with some legwork.

However, the other issue with the Project Gutenberg book, or any other book, and maybe with your $4,000 database as well is the legality of re-using the source for your (possibly commercial) reuse. Food for thought.
posted by FreelanceBureaucrat at 5:01 PM on April 15, 2012

This, maybe? Check out databases that open source programs use.
posted by trig at 2:56 AM on April 16, 2012 [2 favorites]