Comment 2 for bug 346856

I've spent about an hour trying to figure out how to add an alias to cp1251 or to microsoft-cp1251, and getting reminded why I hate all the dozen charstes for Cyrillic that I'm aware of. At last I came to the idea that I'm trying to do the wrong thing - instead of trying to convince all applications that they are dealing with windows-1251 encoded files, I've decided to transcode it to something more common... like UTF-8.

So I did:
andrew@sat11:~$ cd /usr/share/myspell/dicts/
andrew@sat11:/usr/share/myspell/dicts$ sudo cp bg_BG.aff bg_BG.aff.original
[sudo] password for andrew:
andrew@sat11:/usr/share/myspell/dicts$ sudo cp bg_BG.dic bg_BG.dic.original
andrew@sat11:/usr/share/myspell/dicts$ sudo iconv -f cp1251 -t utf-8 -o bg_BG.aff bg_BG.aff.original
andrew@sat11:/usr/share/myspell/dicts$ sudo iconv -f cp1251 -t utf-8 -o bg_BG.dic bg_BG.dic.original
andrew@sat11:/usr/share/myspell/dicts$ sudo sed -i 's/^SET microsoft-cp1251/SET UTF-8/g' bg_BG.aff

This seems to have resolved the issue for me - spell-checking works both for Openoffice and for Pidgin.