Cantonese pronunciation

[thedude]

Hi, I am interested in buying the Chinese-English Dictionary for Palm.

I was wondering in your future updates, do you plan to implement Mandarin and Cantonese Pronounciation? I have seen some of those electronic dictionaries that pronounce words in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and I think that would be a very helpful addition.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

The character reference feature in our upcoming PlecoDict product should allow you to look up the possible Cantonese pronunciations for individual characters, but providing entire dictionary entries in Cantonese would require us to license a whole separate dictionary and quite frankly there just aren't very many Cantonese dictionaries out there, at least not many designed for English-speaking students. We'd certainly consider converting one if we ever found a good dictionary that we could license under reasonable terms, though.

Simply translating all of the Mandarin pronunciations in the dictionary to Cantonese wouldn't be very useful, since often the preferred way to say something in Cantonese uses different characters from the Mandarin version and there are numerous characters and words that are unique to Cantonese (or even to Hong Kong specifically).