Detailed C-E Dictionaries

[mikelove]

Calligraphy dictionaries: 書法字典。Dictionaries for the calligraphic forms of characters. They are sort of like the Chinese Etymology website (I know you weren't accusing him of anything), but they deal with the five main styles of calligraphy:

Ah, that explains it. I actually dug through a couple of those online the other day attempting vainly to search for a better 鱼 to put on our new icon design (a quest that I've now mostly abandoned because for an icon you really need something more polished and font-like, even if it's a calligraphic font).

神馬都是浮雲 as far as I know is a PRC expression. It was all the rage in 2011, supposedly starting from something written on tianya.cn in the latter part of 2010. My web surfing, in spite of my fetish for the Taiwan version of traditional character forms, is nearly all on the mainland, unless I am searching for a particular thing that brings me to the Taiwan web. Other common Internetisms from the PRC web that I can't find in that dictionary are:
女／男孩紙
尼瑪 (well, they list it as a county in Tibet)
桑／搡不起
煞筆 (they have it's legitimate usage, but not it's use for 傻逼/B/__, all three of which they do have)
跑堂／跑堂者 (they have the archaic meaning, but neither the verbal nor nominal forms of the web meaning, and this has been around at least a few years)
臥槽／我操

OK, I'll duly add the lot to our missing words list.

I would really appreciate a more detailed dictionary.

What sort of details specifically are you looking for that aren't in our current dictionaries?

It turns out that I rarely ever need ABC because Pleco's dictionary usually covers most of it with better definitions. Anything that ABC C-E lacks will be covered by ADSO for one word definitions. And surprisingly, most of the time, the definitions for ABC is exactly the same, word-to-word with Pleco's dictionary, just without the example sentences. It might be because there are no better way to define the word but it really isn't helpful at all this way.

That one we've noticed too - thankfully, since the first edition of the dictionary we licensed to base PLC on came out in 1978, we don't have to worry too much about being accused of plagiarism ABC's part-of-speech tagging is quite nice, though, and they also have some up-to-date meanings for words that PLC currently lacks, not to mention more than twice as many entries. But certainly it's in our long-term interest to have PLC be better than ABC since, unlike ABC, it's not available to any of our competitors.

ABC is only good for it's 成語 but I think that use will be pretty redundant when a dictionary for that specific field of definitions.

Actually the 成語 dictionary we've licensed has fewer 成語 than ABC, I think, on top of which, since it's monolingual it's not really as usable for some people. But it'll be a very nice thing for those who can use it.

And even the ABC E-C is basically of no use next to 21st Century dictionary, unless I need to find a word quickly without going through its gigantic wall of unformatted text.

That one we're working on (in conjunction with all of our other dictionary conversion projects).

There's a larger question for E-C we're trying to sort out in general now, in fact it's one of the primary two things we asked the designer we just hired to work on: what's the best way to search for / present English-to-Chinese translations? Neither current approach - E-C dictionaries and full-text searches of C-E ones - is really ideal; the former has the benefit of being curated, but you're at least an extra tap or two away from getting Chinese-English meanings for words, while the latter is more spontaneous but gives you less context / no grouping by senses of the word and the possibility for some translations to just be completely wrong. Using a dictionary to look up what a word means is something I think our app and in fact most electronic dictionaries are already pretty well optimized around, but using a dictionary to look up how to say something in another language is actually a very different problem and I don't think anybody has really cracked it yet.

 

[feng]

I actually dug through a couple of those online the other day attempting vainly to search for a better 鱼 to put on our new icon design (a quest that I've now mostly abandoned because for an icon you really need something more polished and font-like, even if it's a calligraphic font).

Aside from the online calligraphy dictionaries probably not being that inclusive, if the quality of the particular 魚 you find is lacking due to the scan or photo being iffy or the original paper having deteriorated, you can of course play around with it in some sort of program to add or delete black where it should or shouldn't be. Maybe that's not what you were talking about.

but using a dictionary to look up how to say something in another language is actually a very different problem and I don't think anybody has really cracked it yet.

What is it you are looking to do?

 

[mikelove]

Aside from the online calligraphy dictionaries probably not being that inclusive, if the quality of the particular 魚 you find is lacking due to the scan or photo being iffy or the original paper having deteriorated, you can of course play around with it in some sort of program to add or delete black where it should or shouldn't be. Maybe that's not what you were talking about.

We did that, but the shapes of real calligraphy tend to be just naturally a bit more irregular - for whatever reason they just don't seem to look right on an icon.

What is it you are looking to do?

Improve and consolidate English-Chinese search - find a way to effectively merge results from E-C and (fulltext-searched) C-E dictionaries so that a user can enter a particular English word or phrase and quickly / accurately find out how to express that concept in Chinese.

 

[feng]

That sounds like a lexicographical issue rather than a technical issue, but what do I know. The best E-C I know of for getting the right word when you look it up is Langenscheidt (probably spelled it wrong), but it is only 20,000 words and typically only gives you one translation, which I guess is how it can do that. If you have more choices, of course it makes for more confusion. That's why learners' dictionaries are usually smaller. Maybe I am being pessimistic, but it seems like you are asking for something that may be impossible. Perhaps Google can read our minds and find the right word for us!

 

[Wan]

I wish you would get 漢語大詞典 and 漢語大字典。I'm not joking.

You might get your wish on the former - we've actually established a good relationship with that publisher now.

Any news on the 漢語大詞典? Would be an “instabuy”! There is just nothing better when it comes to quotability.
Of course, the dictionaries you made available recently are great, too, thanks for these!

Greetings
Wan

 

[mikelove]

Any news on the 漢語大詞典? Would be an “instabuy”! There is just nothing better when it comes to quotability.
Of course, the dictionaries you made available recently are great, too, thanks for these!

Nothing to report, but in general the new policy is that unless we have a really good reason to, we don't talk specifics about any upcoming dictionaries until they're actually ready for sale - that way, we can delay or replace or cancel them without having a lot of angry customers.

 

[goldyn chyld]

goldyn chyld

Wow, if you managed to licence 汉语大词典, it would definitely be a must buy. I recently purchased 'your' Longman dictionary, which is nice, but I'd surely love to have some other, heftier dicts.

 

[mikelove]

Wow, if you managed to licence 汉语大词典, it would definitely be a must buy. I recently purchased 'your' Longman dictionary, which is nice, but I'd surely love to have some other, heftier dicts.

Already announced that Grand Ricci is coming ("early access" version should be ready any day now, in fact) - does that help any?

 

[goldyn chyld]

Wow, if you managed to licence 汉语大词典, it would definitely be a must buy. I recently purchased 'your' Longman dictionary, which is nice, but I'd surely love to have some other, heftier dicts.

Already announced that Grand Ricci is coming ("early access" version should be ready any day now, in fact) - does that help any?

Oh, I missed that! But unfortunately, French doesn't really help me much...