The FreeDict project aims at providing free (open source) dictionary databases, to be used both by humans and machines. The official home is at http://freedict.org, where you can find documentation for dictionary usage and development.
This repository only contains dictionaries which are not auto-imported, so which were converted once or written by hand. If you are searching for all dictionary sources, you should instead go to https://freedict.org/downloads, where you find the latest source releases of all dictionaries. Auto-imported dictionaries can also be found at https://download.freedict.org/generated.
All dictionaries are encoded in TEI (version 5) which is a flexible XML format to encode human speech. The FreeDict project provides dictionaries but also style sheets to convert the TEI databases into human-readable formats.
At the moment, the dict format and the SLOB format are supported.
The development documentation is in our wiki at https://github.com/freedict/fd-dictionaries/wiki.
You can install precompiled dictionaries on GNU/Linux distributions like Debian (and all derived distributions as Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) and Arch Linux. Please have a look at your package manager.
If you still want to build from source and you don't want to read the wiki, here's a really quick getting started guide:
FREEDICT_TOOLS pointing there.make help. For building make should be
enough, at least if you have both tei2slob and xsltproc installed. It's also
possible to disable some of the output formats, ask our friendly buildsystem
for help: make help.