An early access release of Pleco's edition of Le Grand Dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise, the massively comprehensive scholarly Chinese-French dictionary with over 300,000 entries and plentiful historical data, is finally available. (still far from the last Amazing New Dictionary in the pipeline, but a pretty darn Amazing one)
There's a rather fascinating story behind this title - development involved 300 people and took more than five decades, much of the work being done on paper index cards. It's an amazing dictionary, and we're hoping that the combination of our release and a forthcoming web version might help increase its popularity to the point where it starts to become commercially feasible to consider an English translation.
This release does not include the historical character images from the print/CD-ROM edition, but those should be coming later this year (once we get our software to support embedded images in entries). It's also missing / can't render properly a few other rare characters - again, we're working on it. But in all other respects it should have pretty much the same data as the other editions of GR. Unlike the printed GR, it includes simplified characters along with traditional for multi-character headwords (and not just for single characters).
iOS users can register at:
http://www.pleco.com/newdictreg.html
to be able to download and purchase the dictionary. ($60, possibly not the final pricing but if it changes it would be higher and not lower) You'll need to register again even if you registered for the other early access dictionaries before. As with other early access titles, buying it now will also entitle you to a free copy of the finished version once it's ready.
Android users can download the demo database from:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidpackages/pa2ricci-130323.zip
If you'd like to buy that (also $60), send us an email - we're launching a new version of our website store in a week or two, so we're not bothering to add automated purchasing for this to our old one.
There's a rather fascinating story behind this title - development involved 300 people and took more than five decades, much of the work being done on paper index cards. It's an amazing dictionary, and we're hoping that the combination of our release and a forthcoming web version might help increase its popularity to the point where it starts to become commercially feasible to consider an English translation.
This release does not include the historical character images from the print/CD-ROM edition, but those should be coming later this year (once we get our software to support embedded images in entries). It's also missing / can't render properly a few other rare characters - again, we're working on it. But in all other respects it should have pretty much the same data as the other editions of GR. Unlike the printed GR, it includes simplified characters along with traditional for multi-character headwords (and not just for single characters).
iOS users can register at:
http://www.pleco.com/newdictreg.html
to be able to download and purchase the dictionary. ($60, possibly not the final pricing but if it changes it would be higher and not lower) You'll need to register again even if you registered for the other early access dictionaries before. As with other early access titles, buying it now will also entitle you to a free copy of the finished version once it's ready.
Android users can download the demo database from:
http://cdn.pleco.com/androidpackages/pa2ricci-130323.zip
If you'd like to buy that (also $60), send us an email - we're launching a new version of our website store in a week or two, so we're not bothering to add automated purchasing for this to our old one.
8)
