MovieDict. What do they call it?

International movie title database for iPhone

An app for travelers and language learners who like to talk about their favorite films. Check out the homepage for a little blurb about the project.

How does it work?

The most reliable way to look up a movie’s title in a different languages is to find it on Wikipedia, then follow the links to translations of the article. This is a frustrating workflow on a smartphone, though, especially when the signal is weak. This (multi-)weekend project transforms a Wikipedia dump into a tiny SQLite file, and the MovieDict app for iOS then searches the database using Unicode-enabled full-text search.

Why not use IMDb?

IMDb does not support Chinese or Japanese characters (among others), and is not available offline.

Building the database

Take a look at the Rakefile. There is a task that will run the full process, but manually running things step-by-step while reading the Ruby scripts is the recommended workflow.

License

This is a free app with no business model, and the source code is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.