Pleco ENG > CHIN Pinyin Dictionaries lacking

[stisev]

Hi mike,

I've been reading the forums/web and I've found that even with the addon dictionaries, there is a serious gap in Pleco E>C translation theme. Chinese > English seems like it's covered pretty well with quality dictionaries, but English > Chinese is really lacking. The way I understand it, one can look up an advanced word in a HUGE dictionary like 21rst century E>C dict, and then use the copy to input feature to "send" the hanzi to a massive C>E dictionary like ABC (which also holds pinyin), but this isn't really a solid solution

Here are the options from the way I understand them (please correct me if wrong

1) NWP (2nd best? but lots of complaints on amazon + some on forums)
2) 21cn = Hanzi only
3) C&T Bizz = Pinyin + Hanzi
4) Oxford E>C = Pinyin + Hanzi (best option?)
5) LDC = Hanzi only


I guess my question is: are there any plan to add other E>C Pinyin + Pinyin/Hanzi dictionaries to Pleco? I know your hands might be tied with licensing terms / availability of "good" pinyin dictionaries. What options are available?

 

[mikelove]

There's no such thing as a comprehensive E-C dictionary with Pinyin, or at least we've never seen one - NWP's as good as they get at the moment. 21cn was chosen over the many other Pinyin-less E-C dictionaries out there because it does a very good job in a lot of the areas that people were complaining about NWP / Oxford lacking in - proper nouns, scientific terms, etc.

There's a bidirectional version of the ABC dictionary in the pipeline (not a secret, it was alluded to in a lot of the coverage of Prof. DeFrancis' passing), but it's a "pocket" dictionary rather than a "comprehensive" one like the ABC Chinese-to-English we use now, so while it may take over as the best Pinyin-equipped E-C dictionary out there (and we're hoping to get it into Pleco soon after it's released), it won't have the order-of-magnitude advantage in number of entries that the ABC C-E does over our other Chinese-to-English titles - size-wise I believe it'll be more comparable to NWP than 21cn.

You don't need to use Copy to Input to get Pinyin in 21cn, though, you can use the "Popup Entry" command instead - bit less disruptive at least. (or the "Send to Reader" menu option to quickly read through larger numbers of characters) And you can also use the full-text search feature to look for ABC entries containing a given English word.

And I wouldn't describe there as being a lot of complaints about NWP (on Amazon or on here), there are a few but in general people acknowledge that it's better than anything else out there. We've actually made some changes to our license with them recently that should make it easier for us to correct / expand the NWP dictionary if we so choose - not sure when that would actually get underway, though.

 

[gato]

The way I understand it, one can look up an advanced word in a HUGE dictionary like 21rst century E>C dict, and then use the copy to input feature to "send" the hanzi to a massive C>E dictionary like ABC (which also holds pinyin), but this isn't really a solid solution

In case you haven't seen it, see here for what "Popup Definition" looks like from the Pleco Manual:
http://www.pleco.com/manual/dict.html#popmenu

You can change the preferences for "stylus action" so that selecting text would automatically bring up Popup Definition, which would then give you the pinyin for your selected text. This is the solution you are looking for, I think.
http://www.pleco.com/manual/preferences.html#stylus

 

[stisev]

You can change the preferences for "stylus action" so that selecting text would automatically bring up Popup Definition, which would then give you the pinyin for your selected text. This is the solution you are looking for, I think.

Wonderful functionality. I've read the manual 2 times so far and I somehow missed that one, but I don't think it's a 'solution', since pinyin dictionaries are still lacking (IMO). Sure, this is a temporary fix, but I hope one day someone can release a massive E>C dictionary that's worthy of being included inside pleco

 

[gato]

Wonderful functionality. I've read the manual 2 times so far and I somehow missed that one

Yeah, the section in the manual on "popup definition" probably should cross-reference "stylus action" preference menu, so that it would be easier to spot. I used to be a programmer, so I experimented and found the preference setting on my own without reading the manual.

 

[mikelove]

Good note, we'll fix that the next time we update the manual. And yes, it would be very nice to have a comprehensive Pinyin-equipped E-C dictionary.