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Just an idea. For some individual words and common phrases, you can supplement the API translation with info from Wiktionary and many freely available dictionaries on the Web.

When you have a lot of users, providing static translation for individual words with single meaning should also save you money in the long run, as Google Translate API charges you for all translations the user activates.

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I did look into Wikitionary briefly but it looked horrible to use since the data isn't stored in a structured format. It seemed I'd need to parse the wiki markup and the formatting conventions were different for the different languages, which would make it a tricky job to support all the languages that Readlang does.

It made me wish for an alternative open bilingual dictionary project which is structured and machine readable.

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