CC-CEDICT with Yale Romanization as custom dictionary?

[greg]

Wow, Pleco is a great tool. I'm a new user/customer, and I'm already on the forums to make trouble. :wink:

Actually, I'm old-school in that I learned Chinese using the Yale Romanization system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization Yale seems to have fallen out of favor, but to me, it still makes the most sense for a native English speaker. It's burned into my brain, and helps me "keep the pronunciation rules" when I study. I am familiar with CC-CEDICT http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=cedict and have taken a copy of it, and changed from PinYin in it to Yale Romanization. I took the results of that and made a custom input method for my MacBook, and am very pleased with the result. I used the instructions listed here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/8952.html

Sooooo...my question is this: Can I make my own custom dictionary for Pleco using CC-CEDICT? I already have working code that will parse CC-CEDICT and replace PinYin with Yale. From what I understand, I should be able to take my custom dictionary and upload it to Pleco on my iPhone. Then I should be able to import it as a dictionary. Is this correct? If so, in what format does my custom dictionary need to be? Can Pleco directly import CC-CEDICT in its native format (if so, then my question is answered), or do I need to change it up a bit?

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Wow, Pleco is a great tool. I'm a new user/customer, and I'm already on the forums to make trouble. :wink:

Thanks!

Sooooo...my question is this: Can I make my own custom dictionary for Pleco using CC-CEDICT? I already have working code that will parse CC-CEDICT and replace PinYin with Yale. From what I understand, I should be able to take my custom dictionary and upload it to Pleco on my iPhone. Then I should be able to import it as a dictionary. Is this correct? If so, in what format does my custom dictionary need to be? Can Pleco directly import CC-CEDICT in its native format (if so, then my question is answered), or do I need to change it up a bit?

Unfortunately no - in order to support interesting / complicated Pinyin-related search features (tones optional, ambiguous syllable division (xian/xi'an in the same results list), mixed character / Pinyin search, wildcards, auto-detection of Pinyin versus English, etc) and allow for the use of Zhuyin as an alternate pronunciation system, our databases use a sort of "meta-Mandarin" encoding to deal with pronunciation rather than just doing a regular alphabetical search by Pinyin. So if you tried to import a Yale-romanized database with the user dictionary system you'd get something that was either a) mangled (attempting to parse Yale as Pinyin), or b) only searchable by characters and not by pronunciation at all.

So the only way to get Yale romanization support in Pleco would be for us to add it on our end, as an alternate pronunciation system like we treat Zhuyin now. That's not impossible, but it's enough work that it's tough to justify based on the amount of interest we get - maybe 2-3 emails / forum posts a year asking for Yale or Wade-Giles support. It might happen next year when we add Cantonese support, though, since we already know we're going to have to support a couple of different alphabetic pronunciation systems for that.

 

[dcarpent]

Just to throw in my 2 cents, I would appreciate Wade-Giles support. I don't use Wade-Giles, but when I come across it in older Western texts (which for me is fairly often) it would be helpful to be able to search it directly in Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

Just to throw in my 2 cents, I would appreciate Wade-Giles support. I don't use Wade-Giles, but when I come across it in older Western texts (which for me is fairly often) it would be helpful to be able to search it directly in Pleco.

The tricky thing is that you'd most likely have to switch between romanization systems in Settings rather than being able to just casually type something in in a different system - there's too much conflicting overlap between Wade-Giles and Pinyin for us to auto-detect which one you're using. The big problem is that many of the non-apostrophe'd syllables are identical to Pinyin syllables but have the opposite sound - ch/zh, t/d, k/g, etc; if you just type in "cheng" without an apostrophe we have no idea if you're typing a Pinyin "cheng" or a Wade-Giles "cheng" which is actually a Pinyin "zheng." We could show results for both, but you'd end up with an awful lot of useless false matches in that case.