I'm currently researching per-word language translation (as opposed to the per-sentence/in-context translation provided by eg Google Translate), and as a part of this I'm looking for a comprehensive English-language (as in, I speak English) German dictionary which will map German words against one or more (preferably several) categorical/descriptive English counterparts.
I'm also looking for something with a basic English description of the grammatical inflection of the German words I am looking at, so I can correctly infer the structure of the sentence(s) I am reading.
I'm not sure what format such a database would use, but it would need to be something easy to query programmatically (my sole intention). (As such, the only way I would be looking at software which included such a database would be as a reverse-engineering challenge (!) :P)
I've done a bit of cursory poking around - particularly in the open-source sector - but the offerings I've turned up have fallen apart rather horribly and simply returned no results for lookups of words like "wirst", "mich" or "isst" - and some did provide basic grammatical "grounding", but none felt adequate. But then, I make no claims that I have any idea what's really out there, or where/how to start looking for it.
So, what are my options?
My intentions are strictly for personal, educational use, so open-source is not a critical requirement - "free for non-commercial use" or "free for educational purposes" works just as well for me.
I also don't mind aggregating more than one database or data-source together - I certainly do not require a singular resource to provide all the features I am looking for. I have no upper limit on how many databases I combine.
Lastly, an online service which provided live word translation would be acceptable, if it provided a free account option which would put up with around a hundred queries a day.
steak
looks very useful, and was easy to install - thanks! Regarding grammar, I am looking for a database that operates like a combination of WordReference, translategerman.info and bab.la, but without an internet connection.steak
seems to be a good start.