MoE Idiom/Variant Dictionaries? Taiwanese Publishers?

[澳]

Hi all,

I've used the MoE Chengyu and Variant dictionaries online http://dict.idioms.moe.edu.tw/cydic/index.htm
http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/ and they're a good online resource

I have seen in other threads Mike speaking about the difficulty getting these licensed and the difficulty of working with the MoE in general yet after the successful licensing of the MoE dict and LAC would there be any chance of these two again?

Also staying in the Taiwan sphere how about Taiwanese publishers like Far East etc? Again I've seen they've been difficult in the past but maybe they're finally realising that these apps are the future and would be more open?

All the best

 

[mikelove]

We didn't have to negotiate licenses on MoEDict and LAC, they released them as open-source. We'd be happy to release anything else interesting they offered under a Pleco-friendly open-source license, but they don't appear to have done that with these two titles.

As for Far East, as far as I know their C-E dictionary hasn't been updated since 1986; would probably be impossible to get it in digital format without OCRing (and then painstakingly hand-correcting) the whole thing. We do offer several other natively Traditional Character dictionaries - not just the MoE ones but also LMACD and Oxford (not Traditional-specific but they make official versions in both character sets and we've combined them).

If we wanted to do something else for Taiwan usage we'd probably look at hiring a couple of outside editors to Taiwan-ify our PLC dictionary, as we've already done (and are continuing to do) for Cantonese - frankly that would probably be a lot cheaper than licensing something new, since as with Cantonese the vast majority of meanings are the same.

 

[澳]

Thanks for the reply. Interesting thoughts I hadn't considered.

Cheers

 

[alex_hk90]

If the source data is available in a useful format then you could try to create a Pleco user dictionary - we did this with some of the other MoE dictionaries:
https://github.com/alexhk90/Pleco-User-Dictionaries

 

[澳]

Thanks for the good resource, I've already got the Minnan one along with the other releases. Unfortunately converting the materials myself is a bit over my expertise at the moment