Hi all,
I was wondering if there is a way to make app-specific NVDA speech dictionaries. At the moment, my reason for wanting these is a bit odd: I am mainly interested in using them to translate the important parts of games such as BK1 and BK2, or other non-English games, without needing an Internet connection to hook into Google Translate.

I started working on translations for the aforementioned games, and it was working pretty well. But the thing that always stopped me was that  I had to modify the default dictionary to do it, which I don't think is good practice. So I was hoping for app-specific translation dictionaries, as they would solve a major problem: hundreds of wasted online translations being performed when only one thing changes eg. a number or the player's name. For example, if you're navigating through items, you might hear something like "Rice ball (4) recovers 20 hp." But let's say you use one and go back in the menu, you then hear "rice ball (3) recovers 20 hp." Cached translations are obviously not going to help in this case, so the above example would require two translations, not one. In other words, new online translations have to be performed upon the slightest changes, which in a game like an RPG, can create excessive translation requests. In the above example, you only need to translate the item name and its description, and you can leave the number alone. I had great success doing this with the default dictionary when I tried, but an app-specific dictionary would really be the way to go for this.

I know most people would say "Just use online translation, you're safer." Thing is, in the NVDA translate add-on, you can hit a translation limit pretty quickly if you leave it on throughout the game, forcing you to wait until the limit resets. I can't speak for JGT, but as great as it may or may not be, it only works on Japanese games, not other languages. There are one or two non-Japanese games I would like to play with translation, so JGT isn't the best  solution either. Moreover, online translation has inherent lag and generates excessive traffic overall, so that alone is incentive to do it offline if possible.

Apart from that, ap-specific dictionaries would be great for general use too. Jaws has had such dictionaries for probably near 2 decades now? So it seems like a doable thing. Something so trivial that I'm surprised that NVDA has never had it. i'd be less surprised if I'm just missing something lol

Any thoughts on this?