January 27th Dictionary Releases

- sorry you feel that way. Is it because you would have preferred something more comprehensive? To be honest, our goal with these basic FLTRP dictionaries was more one of language accessibility than anything else - we were aiming to make Pleco usable to people whose English wasn't strong enough to use a Chinese-English dictionary - so we wanted something bidirectional that we could sell for $10. (particularly important with Spanish and Italian as there's not yet any free HanDeDict or CFDICT equivalent for those)
Hi Mike,
Thank you for your answer. You're right. I guess my expectations were too high. Anyway, there's a lot to improve in mainland's Chinese-Spanish-Chinese lexicography (I don't know about Taiwan's and Spanish speaking countries"). 商务印书馆 is expected to release a new edition of its 新汉西词典 this year, but as a daily user of the present one, and having seen the decisions taken on a couple of entries I've been consulted on, I don't feel very optimistic about it. Understandably, mainland's Chinese-Spanish dictionaries are developed with Chinese users in mind. But I'm going off topic here.
 
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Wan

榜眼
@Wan - looks like the website version of that was misbehaving; fixed now, sorry about that. Re Chromium/Archon, any chance you're using an outdated version of Pleco?
Yep, in Chrome, I’m running 3.2.12. I don’t want to risk breaking the setup, so I’ll simply leave it that way. I use Pleco on the phone most of the time, so that will do.
 
@Furio Petrossi - yeah, we're planning to go back and add Pinyin to them eventually since thankfully the licenses are nice and permissive like that. You don't need to use the magnifier, though, just use the expand arrow and it'll take you directly to the definition screen for the highlighted word.

OK, This way works better!
 

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I bought the new Tuttle dictionary as an upgrade on my iPad but it doesn't download on my iPhone (I've tried restoring iTunes purchases) and now
it instead shows up for the full price in the store on my iPhone.
 
italian -> chinese dictionary seems to be not fully indexed: when I search for 椅子 the italian translation does'nt appear.
Look at attached image.
My fault?
 

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A couple of other observations:

土豪

1. It seems to be missing altogether from the Cross-Strait Dictionary.
2. I read that the 3rd version of Guifan supposedly includes the slang sense of this word. However, my version of GF still only lists the "despot" definition only.

How come?
 

Alexis

状元
I bought the new Tuttle dictionary as an upgrade on my iPad but it doesn't download on my iPhone (I've tried restoring iTunes purchases) and now
it instead shows up for the full price in the store on my iPhone.

Try this on your iPhone: Registration >> Check for other purchases

@mikelove Could the"Restore iTunes Purchases" and "Check for other purchases" be merged so that it always does both? I also did the same as Carl. Scratched my head for a bit until I saw the "Check for other purchases" option.
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@goldyn chyld - we do show pronunciation differences, but due to a bug they only come up when LAC is set to the top of Manage Dictionaries; put it there and you'll see a -> arrow before the Taiwan pronunciation and <- before the other one. Disadvantage of launching dictionaries not in conjunction with an app update... but in our next app update we'll fix it so it works regardless of where you put it. Would you prefer it if we had a second listing of both pronunciations at the top of the entry in the meantime (even if it meant extra space)?

Not sure why those arrows aren't showing up in place of the star and triangle, will check on that one.

@ACardiganAndAFrown - no, now we're charging everyone the same price, but in most cases it's what we charged students before (or what we would have charged students before based on royalties etc). Basically, most of our customers were claiming the discount, so we were pretty much setting our prices based on what students would pay and then tacking on extra for non-students, and that extra wasn't making us enough money to justify arbitrarily penalizing people for not being students (or for being honest enough to admit they weren't students).

We were also motivated by an experiment we did - originally just testing two different variations on the add-on purchase UI to see which would sell more, but it turned out that one variation had the side effect of making people much more aware of the availability of student discounts, and the demand curve in that case was basically perfect - more people bought with discounts but in the end we were making exactly the same amount of money on average per person because people didn't buy when they didn't know about / didn't know if they were entitled to the discount. So we think that the people who were previously not claiming discounts will now end up buying more stuff from us because they're getting it for a lower price.

It was also just confusing, honestly, in the last place in your app where you want things to be confusing - people didn't know if they were entitled to a discount or not, didn't know if they were getting a version of the app that was somehow missing features because it was a student version, etc; we were probably losing quite a few sales just to that alone.

We did student discounts originally back in 2009 because a couple of licenses had minimum pricing that we were only allowed to go below in the context of a student discount; most of those clauses have been negotiated away now, though, so there were very few items left for which we were gaining any extra maneuverability on pricing or royalties by virtue of having a student discount. (and if a new one comes up we can always add back a student discount just for that item)

@Carl Nilsson - no idea about that sentence change, need to check which specific version of the data @alex_hk90 used.

@sobriaebritas - it's tough to get Western publishers interested in doing Chinese dictionaries, yeah. Any good one you would recommend? (particularly for Spanish-to-Chinese)

I should add that we have pretty expansive rights on this little title - can really add to it however we like and the royalties are structured so that we don't mind putting a bit of effort / money into doing so. So if there's anything we might be able to put a bit of editorial time into that would make this significantly better we could certainly look into doing that.

@Carl Nilsson - could you email or PM me with the Registration IDs from both devices?

@Shun - ah, thanks, should be fixed now; catalog was pointing to updated versions of those files that we haven't released. (nothing too exciting, minor update mostly to add Bitcode support on iOS and x86 support on Android)

@Furio Petrossi - try putting a # before your search; that will do a full-text search of the I-C half.

@goldyn child - ah, that illuminates the example sentence issue too; looks like we accidentally sent out the version based on 两岸常用词典 rather than 两岸词典. (we converted both) Updated version based on the latter coming shortly once we make sure we've got any other problems covered.

Re Guifan, that is odd - I just wrote the publisher, data we got from them only has the one meaning so not sure where the new one went.

@Alexis - that's coming, the reason we don't do it now is because "Restore iTunes Purchases" requires you to re-enter your iTunes password but pretty soon we'll be moving over to Apple's new purchase restore system that doesn't require a password.
 
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Try this on your iPhone: Registration >> Check for other purchases

@mikelove Could the"Restore iTunes Purchases" and "Check for other purchases" be merged so that it always does both? I also did the same as Carl. Scratched my head for a bit until I saw the "Check for other purchases" option.

Ty Alexis! It worked! I think I have tried that another time but I had forgot about it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
An entry newly added in the Supplement (订补)。You'll see similar notes for added data from the supplement (corrections / expansions and such).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
You mean to make it into a Cantonese-to-English dictionary? We already checked it and found that virtually every word in it was already covered accurately by CC-CEDICT or CC-Canto in that direction. (this is designed to solve the 'which Cantonese translation is best' problem more than the 'give me every possible Cantonese translation' problem)
 
@mikelove: I see. It does show the arrows now if you move the app to the top of the list. I think it's good that it displays the Tw pronunciation first and then the Mainland one where it applies, the way it currently does. However, I'd still prefer the【臺】and【陸】tags rather than the arrows. Somehow I find the characters more intuitive than arrows.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@Furio Petrossi - we'll see what we can do on that, perhaps we can add some of the content to C-I searches via a secondary reverse index.

@goldyn chyld - sure, but then we have to talk down all of the people who'll be offended by 陸. (the notion that not-Taiwan = "mainland" greatly upsets some people, and the notion that not-Taiwan = "China" greatly upsets some other people, so we don't have a good inoffensive name to use; arrows were the most neutral alternative we could come up with, at least for a 'cross-strait' dictionary)
 

Abun

榜眼
@goldyn chyld - sure, but then we have to talk down all of the people who'll be offended by 陸. (the notion that not-Taiwan = "mainland" greatly upsets some people, and the notion that not-Taiwan = "China" greatly upsets some other people, so we don't have a good inoffensive name to use; arrows were the most neutral alternative we could come up with, at least for a 'cross-strait' dictionary)
I see the problem... but wouldn't that technically mean that you would have to purge all instances of 大陸 or 中國 from dictionaries where they are used as an antonym to 台灣, including in definitions, say, in the 漢語大詞典 or the 教育部辭典? Personally I think that it's the dictionary publishers that are responsible for the dictionary texts; it's their decision to write 【陸】 vs. 【臺】 or 【中】 vs. 【臺】 and if somebody is unhappy with it, you can always say you just present the dictionary entry in the way it was published. Or do you already also politically "defuse" entries in dictionaries other than your own?
But if you want to use neutral symbols, maybe arrows pointing to the left (west of the Strait) or right (east of the Strait) are easier to understand?
 
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