Confused about dictionaries

[flameproof]

I am really confused about the dictionaries options.

I D/L the demo. It comes with OX. EN>CN seems quite limited. Right now I use Ectaco, which has far more entries.

Upgrading to ABC does not seem to make sense, coz I need EN>CN+PY, PY>CN/EN. ABC has no EN>CN

CEDICT and Adso are supposed to be CN>EN only.

But ZDT uses CEDICT and it works 3 way (EN, CN, PY)

I hope somebody can enlighten me.

BTW, Ectaco is a good product with many entries, but has no chinese writing input.

 

[mikelove]

The ABC doesn't have EN->CN capability, but the NWP dictionary that comes bundled with it does. The NWP should be accessible in the demo version along with the Oxford and ABC dictionaries. It's still not as large as the Ectaco dictionary, but it should be comparable to the reverse CEDICT.

The free add-on dictionaries available on our website will work with any version of PlecoDict, so you could always install one of those to help fill in any gaps in the Oxford dictionary. The LDC English-Chinese wordlist should fill in most of the Oxford's coverage gaps.

The reason why ZDT supports 3-way use of CEDICT is (I believe) because ZDT has a full-text search capability, so that it can search dictionary definitions as well as headwords. Our software currently lacks this ability, but we're planning to add it in version 2, so if you can wait a few months it should be possible to perform 3-way searches on the ABC in that new version. (the reason it's taken so long is that PDAs have much more limited computing power than desktops and hence it requires a lot more effort to add a full-text search function to a portable dictionary than it does to add it to a desktop one)

 

[flameproof]

Thanks for the to the point reply! Specially for the CEDICT part. I have to say that ZDT does open very slow too on my desktop.

I may now go for the basic version and will use the free adsotrans dict instead of the ABC, since they seem quite similar.

Or is there any compelling reason against it?

And, is there a way to make use of the Ectaco dict? It seems not to be a standard DB though..

Anyway, I won't wait a few month since the 2.0 upgrade will be free.... I hope it can still run on my oldish H1940 ....

PS: what I miss in Ectaco: the character recognition on my English PDA, also the link to ZDT seems usefull for future use.

谢谢你！

 

[mikelove]

Well the ABC does have a number of advantages over the Adso - example sentences, better traditional character support, better accuracy in general really, more Chengyus and other general-purpose vocabulary (a large % of Adso's size comes from their vast numbers of scientific/medical terms) - but if you find its online version sufficient for your needs then it should be satisfactory in Pleco as well.

There's no way to make use of the Ectaco dictionary in our software, but we're very close to announcing a new addition to 2.0 (though sadly not a free one) that should more than replace it. 2.0 should certainly run on your H1940.