If you have an iPhone and you're learning Chinese you've got a problem. There's no dictionaries for the iPhone (jailbroken of course) that support English to Pinyin. They're all Engish to Chinese characters. This is fine of course if you're a Chinese speaker, but for us noobs learning Chinese it can be frustrating.

Seeing that WeDict (a jailbroken iPhone dictionary application) supported StarDict and having some experience with the CEDICT I set out to see if I could convert the CEDICT to StarDict (I wasn't able to find any CEDICT StarDicts on the Internet, perhaps someone else has done this before and my GoogleFu failed).

The result is this. It's an english to pinyin dictionary with simplified Chinese characters inclued. It's an archive containing three files: "english-pinyin.dict.dz", "english-pinyin.idx", and "english-pinyin.ifo". First install WeDict from Installer. Once that's done, these three files can be "tar xvfz"ed and copied to your iphone /var/Library/WeDict folder (use FTP or SCP to do so) and you're ready to go.

The dictionary isn't too bad, the accuracy of the words in most cases is pretty good. One issue is that it's not always obvious which of the multiple translations to use. However it's an invaluable aid to those with iPhone's learning Chinese.

Permission is given to modify and redistribute under terms of the original CEDICT license.

English to Pinyin WeDict Files