mandarin english only translator

enviromen

Member
I just want simple mandarin-english translator. current price for basic pleco still too expensive, how to contact software owner?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Are you on iOS or Android? Which currency? I don't know of any with that dramatic of a difference from conversion, but we have to manually refresh the currency conversion prices on Google Play, so if it's dramatically off we can look into it. You can always buy at the actual USD price in USD at our website store.
 

enviromen

Member
i particular pleco for ability to draw a unrecognised chinese character on mobile phone screen n its meaning explained
does google translate
百度翻译
Baidu
i have to your chinese character to Google translate box. how to do that if i see the characters on a signboard
 

JD

状元
i particular pleco for ability to draw a unrecognised chinese character on mobile phone screen n its meaning explained
does google translate

Baidu
i have to your chinese character to Google translate box. how to do that if i see the characters on a signboard

Add other software keyboards:
All phones have the ability to input other languages (such as Chinese). You just have to add that keyboard input method. For example, on iOS/iPadOS, I have added both a Pinyin input keyboard and a Chinese Character drawing keyboard. I expect Android supports the same too, but don’t know the mechanics to add those keyboards. This allows you to draw and type Chinese characters. So, for example, you can type Chinese characters (or draw them) directly into any app’s input box (into any translation app or website).

Many apps allow OCR:
Lots of apps also support OCR (optical character recognition). Some do live translations, others translate off the picture you take of what you see. Pleco supports both, Baidu and Google translate support (at least) the ”read and translate the image” method. (You need to hit the “camera” button in these two apps and they pop up the camera view.)

So, the basic mechanics of inputting characters and scanning them are supported across a range of apps and phones.

Where Pleco excels is allowing you to find the definition of characters and words across multiple dictionaries. Then you can see the breakdown of words into characters, break characters further down into component characters, or reverse it and find words and sentences containing the characters.

Sometimes the use case is: “I just want to know simply what this means.” In that case a basic translation app is sufficient.

Other times the use case is: “I really want to understand this language and learn it deeply with its subtle meanings”. In that case you need to look up new words and see how they are used across the language and how the usage varies by usage and region (i.e. checking multiple dictionaries to see how they use the word). Pleco is fantastic for A PART of this use case!

But, then Pleco isn’t enough here. You need to ALSO start to understand the language‘s grammar and hear it being used, and learn to construct sentences and speak them yourself. Then you start needing grammar resources, dialogs, conversations, etc.
 
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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
1 United States Dollar equals
4.24 Malaysian Ringgit

Thanks, but I think I misunderstood your point - the currency conversion for MYR seems to be fine, but it is indeed 4 times the number of MYR as it is USD. But the same is true with most apps / tech products; the Samsung Galaxy S21 seems to currently go for 800 USD and 3200 MYR.
 
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