I want to experiment with an idea I have of automatically localizing software, or at least suggesting a reasonable translation if a localized string is not available.
I'm not sure this will be working satisfactorily tomorrow morning but I just wanted to play with this idea.
Does anybody know of a dictionary that is free to use, and is in an easy to parse format, that can help me automatically translate words from English to other European languages (French, German, Spanish, etc)
I don't know any dictionary but would like to point something out. You have to bear in mind that translating is not a direct word to word technique in any sense. The Rules of the language change as well and thus leave sentences unreadable. This is why even companies like Google have trouble making good translation software. Context is very hard to programmatically detect and context means everything in choosing the right word, the right structure and so on.
Maybe use a Translation API, if there is one. Google only seem to do a JavaScript API for Language.
The FreeDict project has quite a few relatively complete dictionaries. Most are from one language to english or vice versa, but some are between two non-english languages as well.
You can't even expect to get a reasonable translation with an automatic method. Translating full texts is too hard for a computer to handle completely correct, translating short phrases correctly is impossible.
Take for example the simple text "Open", without a context it's not even possible to tell if it's a verb or an adjective. I know that at least in german that the verb and the adjective translates into two different words.
Also, computer specific concepts often borrow words from similar concepts outside the computer sphere. Those concepts often have a specific translation, but an automatic translation would sometimes try to translate it as if it was the original meaning, which can give you very strange translations.
After a while of searching i solved the problem by myself start to create my own dictionary. I do a lot of translations in my free time. In the beginning it is really boring work...but after a while you get an really good dicitionary. Some friends of mine using it too...so we all benefit from every new Word we translate.