It's true the process of installing dictionaries is not as friendly as one might like, and having debian packages for the dictionaries would help most users. Even for people who are not scared to do a little command line, it is not trivial to find out which is a good dictionary for a certain language. For instance the german-english dictionaries available from sourceforge seemed to be pretty bad, missing a lot of basic words (even though they are not small in terms of number of entries).

I am currently using two dictionaries.

One is a german dictionary that is freely available (langensheidt deutsch als fremdsprache, available from stardict sourceforge ). It is quite good quality, although not huge and perhaps a bit oldish. This one would be a good candidate for a package.

The other one is german english and viceversa from dict.cc... it is a huge dictionary (700k entries!) and quite good as well. It is freely available but not redistributable, so it would not be possible to package it as a deb. You can download it in tab format from the web site, and then you need to convert it to stardict format using the tabfile tool from stardict (on ubuntu it is in the stardict-tools package). See this page for details. Make sure the tab file is saved as utf8 before running tabfile (I had to open it and save it as utf8 with gedit to get the encoding right).

Anyhow with a little effort my offline dictionary needs on the n900 are now fully met ;-)