Dictionarist is a language tool resembling a Swiss army knife: It’s a free online talking dictionary which provide translation in 13 languages.

This cool language tool translates to and from English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. When combined, this makes 60 translation options (English to French, French to English, Spanish to Turkish, Turkish to Spanish etc.).

I’ve tested Dictionarist and talked to Ugur Catak of the Dictionarist team.

How it works

Next to the search box is a link to a tiny virtual keyboard. This can come in handy if you want to type a query in e.g. Russian. There are virtual keyboards for English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Turkish-F, Turkish-Q, Portuguese, Dutch and Greek.

Dictionarist also pronounces the words in all these dictionaries. If you have ever wondered how a German would pronounce the word gesamtkunstwerk, click the image of the speaker next to the word and a German gentleman speaks.

There’s also a dictionary index, which lets you browse the indexes for words and phrases. Browsing the English dictionary, I learned that the expression a bolt from the blue translates into Spanish as como un balde de agua fría, which means like a bucket of cold water.

The search interface of Dictionarist is available in French, German and Turkish as well as English.

The making of Dictionarist

“The idea of Dictionarist was first born in 2005 by two software developer friends working for the same company in Istanbul,” says Ugur Catak of the Dictionarist team.”

“We were talking about lack of a good free dictionary/translator. We had some data collected over many years, but still the data was unorganized and needed a lot of work. The goal of the project was, in the first place, to provide an easy to use, free and useful tool for ourselves and others. While coding it, the idea was making a tool that we would use ourselves. ”

So where did you go from there to end up with a many faceted language tool like Dictionarist?

Ugur explains: “In the beginning our goal was to create a free translator Windows application. So we started to work on the data, coding a windows application. In time, the data started getting organized and through the contribution of some other friends who have more data, the idea of building an online free dictionary was born.
It took more than 2 years to organize the data and get the engine working.”

After 6 months of beta testing and some additional coding, Dictionarist was online in January 2008. “We are happy with the release and will continue to improve it in the future,” says Ugur Catac and adds: “The name Dictionarist was one of the ideas for the name. We have chosen it because we were in Istanbul and were coding a dictionary. It was not hard to decide ”