Working on glossarys (dictionary databases) using python. Including editing glossarys and converting theme between many formats. The support matrix is,

• BeautifulSoup4(with html5lib as backend) required to sanitize html contents.

  sudo easy_install beautifulsoup4 html5lib

• GNU make as part of Command Line Tools for Xcode.
• Dictionary Development Kit as part of Auxillary Tools for Xcode. Extract to /Developer/Extras/Dictionary Development Kit

Let's assume the Babylon dict is at ~/Documents/Duden_Synonym/Duden_Synonym.BGL:

cd ~/Documents/Duden_Synonym/
python ~/Software/pyglossary/pyglossary.pyw --read-options=resPath=OtherResources --write-format=AppleDict Duden_Synonym.BGL Duden_Synonym.xml
make
make install

Launch Dictionary.app and test.

Let's assume the MDict dict is at ~/Documents/Duden-Oxford/Duden-Oxford DEED ver.20110408.mdx.

• Use GetDict to extract Mdict dictionary (.mdx). Choose "UTF-8 TXT" output format and Duden-Oxford DEED ver.20110408.mtxt output file name.

• Run the following command:

  cd ~/Documents/Duden-Oxford/
  python ~/Software/pyglossary/pyglossary.pyw "Duden-Oxford DEED ver.20110408.mtxt" "Duden-Oxford DEED ver.20110408.xml"
  make
  make install

Launch Dictionary.app and test.

Let's assume the MDict dict is at ~/Downloads/oald8/oald8.mdx, along with the image/audio resources file oald8.mdd.

Run the following commands: :

cd ~/Downloads/oald8/
python ~/Software/pyglossary/pyglossary.pyw --read-options=resPath=OtherResources --write-format=AppleDict oald8.mdx oald8.xml

This extracts dictionary into oald8.xml and data resources into folder OtherResources. Hyperlinks use relative path. :

sed -i "" 's:src="/:src=":g' oald8.xml

Convert audio file from SPX format to WAV format. You need package speex from MacPorts :

find OtherResources -name "*.spx" -execdir sh -c 'spx={};speexdec $spx  ${spx%.*}.wav' \;
sed -i "" 's|sound://\([/_a-zA-Z0-9]*\).spx|\1.wav|g' oald8.xml

But be warned that the decoded WAVE audio can assume ~5 times more disk space!

Compile and install. :

make
make install

Launch Dictionary.app and test.