I found a great online dictionary at freedict, but as I mentioned above, it is a bit cumbersome. So I wrote a small python script to do the look up on that site for me. Put this on your path and you've got a commandline multi-language dictionary. This particular site does a lot of different translation, so I am going to modify my script so you can specify what exactly you want to translate and expand away from just Japanese to English. But for now, enjoy:
#!/usr/local/bin/python2.5
import urllib
import sys
import re
pattern = re.compile('')
data = urllib.urlencode({"search":sys.argv[1],"exact":"true","max":"10","to":"English","from":"Japanese","fname":"eng2jap2","back":"jap.html"})
file = urllib.urlopen("http://www.freedict.com/onldict/onldict.php",data)
results = pattern.sub('**',file.read())
pattern = re.compile('<(.|\n)*?>')
results = pattern.sub('',results)
pattern = re.compile('\s*\n+')
results = pattern.sub('\n',results)
pattern = re.compile('New search')
results = pattern.sub('',results)
pattern = re.compile('Online Dictionary Search Results')
results = pattern.sub('',results)
pattern = re.compile('\s\s\sJapanese')
results = pattern.sub('',results)
pattern = re.compile('\s\s\sEnglish')
results = pattern.sub('\n',results)
pattern = re.compile(' ')
results = pattern.sub('',results)
results = results.split('\n')
iterator = iter(results)
while True:
try:
line = iterator.next()
if '**' in line:
pattern = re.compile('\s*[A-Za-z]+')
match = pattern.match(line)
if match is not None:
line = line + iterator.next()
line = line.replace('**',' ')
print line
except StopIteration:
break
It is not perfect yet, but it'll do the job 95% of the time.
