How to get plain text files out of Babylon.
===========================================

Babylon is a commercial dictionary programme for Windows, translating from
English to several other languages.  Free dictionary files are available,
but in a proprietary binary format.  FrŽdŽric Jolliton has written a
C-programme called babytrans which is a unix command line interface to
these files.  (This programme is the basis of several linux versions of
babylon (wordtrans, Qtrans, etc.))

Jolliton's programme is available at 
http://fjolliton.free.fr/babytrans/babylon-c.tgz

The babylon dictionary files lie at
ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/languages/babylon_dict/

You need to take the english.dic (which is a sort of index file needed for
translation to any other language), and then choose among the EngtoLan.dic
files (where Lan is one of Fre, Spa, Ger, Por, Ita, Dut, Eng...)

Using this programme you can look up all the words you want, and write
to a file.  I have written a tcl script to do that: it requires an English
wordlist: then it looks up all the words in this list, and write a file
with markup and tcl procs, ready to be used in Alpha.


Here are the detailed instructions:

The operation takes place in a unix prompt, and it assumes tclsh is
installed on the system (as well as a C compiler).

1) Download the dictionary files from 
       ftp://ftp.ac-grenoble.fr/ge/languages/babylon_dict/
2) Download and unpack Jolliton's C programme babylon-c from
       http://fjolliton.free.fr/babytrans/babylon-c.tgz
3) Compile it. (Just go into the directory and type 'make').
   The resulting executable 'babylon' should be moved to the
	 same directory as the dictionary files.
4) Check that babylon works, looking up some word with the command
       ./babylon english.dic EngtoLan.dic hammock
	 This should display the corresponding dictionary entry on the screen
5) Download a wordlist and leave it in this same directory.
   (I have compiled one specially for this task --- you can take it at 
	     http://www-math.unice.fr/~kock/alpha-tcl/aWordlist.gz )
6) Move the two files drainbab.tcl and norm.tcl into the directory you
   are working in
7) open a tclsh and type
       source drain.tcl; drain aWordlist EngtoLan.dic
	 (where Lan is one of Fre, Eng, Dut, Spa, Por, Ger, Ita...)
	 This process may take an hour or so, and it will produce a 
	 dictionary file called EngtoLan.dictionary
	 (Exit the tcl shell by saying exit).
8) It remains to convert \n newlines into \r, and Latin1 encoding into
   MacRoman.  To do this, open the file EngtoLan.dictionary in Alpha, 
	 and use filters.

