German?

sahal

秀才
Hi Mike and staff,

First, a big thank you for your great product, and the quick support. I have seen in another thread that you were looking into licensing commercial German-Chinese dictionaries. Any idea about when they might become available? I know the market is not really that big, but on the other hand all the German/Chinese dicts available on the app store either just run on HDD/DHD (which are already available for pleco), or require online access (leo) or come with a big price tag and bad reviews (Langenscheidt). And of course none of them seems to allow cross-referencing with other dicts.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
sahal said:
First, a big thank you for your great product, and the quick support. I have seen in another thread that you were looking into licensing commercial German-Chinese dictionaries. Any idea about when they might become available? I know the market is not really that big, but on the other hand all the German/Chinese dicts available on the app store either just run on HDD/DHD (which are already available for pleco), or require online access (leo) or come with a big price tag and bad reviews (Langenscheidt). And of course none of them seems to allow cross-referencing with other dicts.

Working on it with two different publishers actually - not sure which one will come together first, though, and unfortunately these aren't two publishers that tend to go about things particularly quickly.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hi Mike,
any news on that German dictionary? I would really, really, really love to give you guys more money :D

We've got sample data for a few options, we're kind of swamped with finishing our big iOS update but we're going to try to sort this out after that.

Do you have any opinions on the 《现代汉德词典》 and/or the 《新编德汉词典》 from 外研社?
 
Yes, honestly I didn't have much good experience with German (or for that matter English) materials from Chinese companies. That being said, I never looked into the options you mentioned and pleco has been following me since I study Chinese.

Personally I would prefer a dictionary by Langenscheidt (http://www.amazon.de/Langenscheidt-...6774&sr=8-1&keywords=langenscheidt+chinesisch)...

I'll be visiting Germany for the next holidays and I'm sure to have a look at Wilfried Fuchsenberger's ...

What concerns me a bit, with a lot of these publications is the date... 2004, 2007, or Fuchsenberger's (2002). That seems to be a bit old, and I'd be afraid of not finding "new" words in them ;)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We've had 汉德大词典 on our list for a while but we haven't yet had much luck making contact with FLP, sadly.

We've been doing business with 外研社 for almost a decade now and already license three other titles from them (one of which hasn't yet been released but should be this fall), hence our interest in using their German dictionaries.

For up-to-date words you generally need to get your data either from an open-source dictionary like CC-CEDICT or from a company that updates their closed-source electronic dictionary frequently like us - 给力 for example is in CC and PLC but still not in ABC or even in the big new Oxford that was published in 2010.

At some point we'd like to get in the business of maintaining our own official lexicon and constructing entries for any missing words from it for any dictionaries we can (so in other words we'd add a German entry for 给力 if there wasn't one already), but we don't quite have the manpower to do that yet.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Only just signed the license, and still haven't taken delivery of the data files, so we're still a little ways away.
 

John.

秀才
Hi, sorry for reviving this old thread, but are there any chances that the 汉德大词典by Fuchsenberger is ever going to be available in Pleco? Even though I bought all German dictionaries in Pleco I still find myself looking up words in the 汉德大词典 and creating flashcards from it manually quite often – it features much more entries than the German dictionaries currently available, its definitions are more comprehensive and often more accurate. I think most German users of Pleco would love to buy it.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Maybe, but I haven't been able to get through to that publisher so far.

Also just in general our non-English dictionary sales have been somewhat of a disappointment and I'd like to try to revive them by localizing our UI before doing any more licenses - I'm optimistic that if we do offer our app's interface / manual / etc in German we'll flush out a lot more German speaking users who will in turn spend enough money to make it easy to swing the financials for some new licenses like 汉德大词典, but in the meantime I'm a little reluctant to take on that risk.
 
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