TLDR;

1. Just download eng-viet-dict.mobi file and send it to your kindle email <user.name>@kindle.com!
2. Wait for your kindle to download the dictionary file.
3. Change your default dictionary to English-Viet-Dictionary.

English Vietnamese Dictionary for Kindle

Last year, I received a Amazon Kindle PaperWhite as a gift. Since then, I've been reading more books from my Kindle. By default the Kindle does come with few popular dictionaries from English to Chinese, Spanish, French... but I was a little disappointed because there is no English-Vietnamese dictionary. So I tried to find a English-Vietnamese dictionary. Unfortunately, I have found none. Then I decided to create my own English-to-Vietnamese dictionary for the Kindle.

Getting Started

These instructions will help you to create your own dictionary for Amazon Kindle. Feel free to modify and change the code to fit your needs.

Prerequisites

• Install KindleGen from Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

• Add kindlegen to your $PATH
• Make sure you install calibre application for your MacOSX

https://calibre-ebook.com/download

Installing

If you don't care about any technical stuff, just ignore and import eng-viet-dict.mobi to your calibre app or email this file to kindle email <username>@kindle.com

Otherwise, you can take a look at build_dict.sh to see how I generate that file.

./build_dict.sh 

Limitation

Initially I tried to import all words and definition from startdict_en_vi.txt (~350K words). KindleGen was not able to handle that much of data so I needed to reduce the number of words to import.

I used this awk to get common words from dictionary.txt file.

awk -F\t 'FNR==NR {a[$1]; next}; $1 in a' dictionary.txt stardict_en_vi.txt > common-english-viet-words.txt

Happy Reading