translate retranslate

[mb139]

I am thinking of moving from the Palm with the Oxford Dictionary on it, to iPhone or iPod Touch.

I make heavy use of the translate - retranslate method of checking that I am using the right word: going English to Chinese, I look up the English word, and then check by highlighting what I guess to be the closest Chinese equivalent, switching to the Chinese, which then shows up the Chinese characters with English translations.

The Oxford dictionary is the only one, as I understand it, that is the dictionary contains both the Chinese ->English and English ->Chinese parts. I see that the Oxford Dictionary is no longer used on Pleco software, and than none of the other dictionaries go both ways.

Were I to go for the iPod or the iPhone, would I lose this facility?

 

[mikelove]

You can certainly still use that method; we actually even have a bidirectional dictionary of sorts now, the ABC English-Chinese and Chinese-English dictionaries are sold separately for licensing reasons but they're from the same publisher and based on the same word list. And in fact the cross-referencing is even easier in our iPod/iPhone app; you don't need to highlight anything, you can just tap on a Chinese word in an English-Chinese dictionary entry to pop up its definition instantly.

We also support full-text English searches in our iOS software, so you can actually search a Chinese-English dictionary (even the built-in free one) for entries containing a particular English word and then browse through them to find the word you want.