How To Use A German-English Dictionary with Kindle Cloud Reader

As a language instructor and author of language learning textbooks, I’ve always found the Kindle’s built-in dictionary a great way to make reading foreign language texts more fluid and frictionless. Whether it’s on your Kindle ereader, on your iPhone or iPad Kindle app, or Kindle Android app (see links for detailed instructions), custom dictionaries can be easily integrated, so that all you need to do is tap on unknown words to get an immediate translation.

What has been missing from this list so far is an option to get the same feature on desktop computers, i.e. when reading Kindle books on your PC or Mac.

Cloud Reader: Not Enough Dictionaries, No Copy & Paste

While trying to get Kindle PC to accept custom dictionaries ultimately proved futile, I started looking into another way to accomplish this with Kindle Cloud Reader. In case you’re not familiar with it, Cloud Reader is a web-app that allows you to read Kindle books directly from your browser. Also Cloud Reader offers a handful of pre-installed dictionaries, but unfortunately there is no discernible way to install more dictionaries. Even purchased dictionaries from the Kindle store don’t show up here.

Furthermore, Kindle Cloud Reader doesn’t allow copying of text, which is probably to prevent piracy, but also it prevents readers to look up and translate words or use third-party browser extensions for further study, such as flashcards, etc.

The Kindle Cloud Reader Bookmarklet

So is Kindle Cloud Reader also a dead-end street if you’re trying to “click & translate” words from your Kindle books? Turns out, binarycrafts from Romania have found a way to circumvent Kindle Cloud reader’s blocking of text copying by use of a simple bookmarklet.

I’ve adapted their code for language learning purpose (specifically German learning), so that after activating the bookmarklet you get two different options for sending selected text to either dict.cc or Google Translate.

activating this bookmarklet will add two buttons

How does it work?Drag this bookmarklet to you bookmark bar (or copy this code and paste it into a new bookmark URL)

+ Kindle Translator

Go to read.amazon.com

Click on the bookmarklet. You’ll get a popup confirmation upon successful launch.

Click on words to translate either via dict.cc or Google Translate

Obviously this is just a hack until Amazon will (hopefully) add the use of custom dictionaries to their PC, Mac or Cloud reader application. But until then it’s certainly a way to get quick translations. Let me know in the comments what you think.

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Special thanks to Peter Cole's Bookmarklet Creator.

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

   

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