Review of Online English-Persian Dictionaries

How Effective Are They?

A phenomenal project landed on my lap recently, allowing me to use my Persian language skills to review translated articles for the National Geographic Society. This prompted me to look closely at existing free Persian dictionaries online, all of which offer translation solutions in both directions: English into Persian and vice versa.

It is interesting to use these dictionaries, along with hardback ones that are a little more detailed, and notice that both can come in quite handy. 

The first dictionary that impressed me was http://www.dictionary-farsi.com/. The lady sun logo, all too familiar to anyone not new to Persian culture, feels reassuring and familiar. The colors are neither too obscure, nor too bright. It works. Dictionary-Farsi even offers tabs for proverbs and idioms, a treat for anyone familiar with old Persian dictionaries that did not contain such clear cut divisions. It was impressive to see that one could find the equivalent of the English idiom “Jack of all trades” or the proverb “Never look a gift horse in the mouth” in Persian. 

Another one that has an appealing interface is http://farsidic.com/. It is easy to type a search and offers an added bonus of narrowing one’s search down to “starts with”, “exact” or “contains”, the latter of which bears more results from which to choose. An added bonus is the iphone app compatibility with: http://FarsiDic.com/M for those wishing to use this resource on the go.

I personally have not had much luck with http://aryanpour.com/. This could be because of the small font, or because I often get the message “not found”. Yet, I know it to be a great source of reference. In addition to the search criteria “starts with”, “exact” or “contains”, this site also offers “word of the day”, “random word” and “story of the day”.

The most modern interface and search box has to be that of http://www.ariadic.com/#. It predicts the word as one types and pops up options (much like the online dictionaries for romance languages that are faster because of this feature and the lack of difference in writing systems). Aria Dic seems to focus on translating from and into Spanish, French, Swedish, German, Arabic and Italian (I tried a couple of examples to test Spanish into Persian for ‘yerno’ and did not get results; and for ‘suegro’, it was only willing to show ‘suegra’ and for French the letter ‘a’ would appear as a ‘q’).

All of these dictionaries offer a tab where a keyboard appears on screen with Persian letters, should one need to look up reverse meanings. Often, these need to be exact or they won’t show results.

One main suggestion is that all online English into Persian dictionaries need to work on phrasal verbs. When you type in “pass out” or “put up with”, nothing comes up.  

Given that the switching of the writing system continues to be a hassle due to the inherent features of common keyboards, the efforts gathered in all of these dictionaries are highly admirable. As a linguist, I am grateful to the minds behind these free online dictionaries and look forward to more progress and fine-tuning on all of them.