Thesaurus Ideas

[stephanhodges]

I've really wanted a couple of thesaurus features. I did a quick search, but things are very slow from here in Harbin. Only read one post where Mike replied that there wasn't anything easyily found to license.

Couple of options for that.

1) There are some free English Thesaurus available. You could do something like select/highlight a definition or word, and either get an English thesaurus lookup (where I could then choose one to see quick Chinese suggestions) or

2) Pre-Generate a cross reference with English words in dictionary. By this, I mean, looking up "make", you could find other words with make (may be a bad choice, I know), limiting to primary definitions, etc. Or, you could go indirect through a thesaurus database to construct a set of likely index values, etc.

By Pregenerate, I mean that you do this in the office once per dictionary, and then add them as an "add-on" set of files.

Many times, I've searched Wenlin, for example, and found lots of good "alike" type words this way manually.

 

[ldolse]

LDC Dictionary?

Have you tried installing the free LDC dictionary for Pleco? Most of it's definitions could be viewed more like Chinese thesaurus results for that english word, as they almost universally contain numerous chinese options. As an example, the word 'test' returns 12 different chinese words. I've found it's often the fastest way to find a lot of variations on an english translation. Unfortunately you have to cross-reference each entry with a chinese dictionary to get the english senses, but that's not too hard. (it's also wise to install Adso, as there are many obscure words)
2.0 should theoretically make cross-referencing easier.

 

[stephanhodges]

Not sure I have that one. I have one called "UNI", but will check the downloads. However, I don't know that much Chinese, so a thesaurus function which could list related words in a "table" with chinese-english for example would help me more right now.

 

[mikelove]

The full-text search feature in Pleco 2.0 might help with this a little; you could do a search of the C-E dictionary for a particular English word and hopefully find a bunch of alternatives that way. Our new C-C dictionary would also help, of course, since Chinese isn't as wordy in general as English and many of the definitions consist primarily or exclusively of lists of synonyms.