For the super-duper-adventurous, if you're running the latest version of Pleco on your iPhone you can register your device at:
(link offline, on sale officially now)
to immediately get access to our 5 "Early Access" new dictionaries, including our long-awaited first Classical Chinese one. If you've previously purchased Oxford and transferred your license to iPhone from Palm/WM but Oxford nonetheless shows up as a demo version, go into Settings / Manage Registration / Check for new purchases and it should automatically activate.
On Android, links to manually download / purchase the 4 new dictionaries (no Oxford since that's already available officially):
Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Download / Buy
Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: Download / Buy
Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine: Download / Buy
Chinese Medical Terms List (free): Download
Note that on Android, the links in Longman and PDCM will be a bit wonky - the Longman ones are fixed in the current beta version (see Android forum) and the PDCM ones will be fixed in the next beta version. Links should all work OK in our current iOS app, though. Also, these haven't been updated to use the Android beta version's new character variant format, so all of these dictionaries will behave a bit funny in merged searches in that (won't always merge correctly, especially in Longman) - fixes coming shortly for that.
I should stress right away that this is not by any means all that we have in the pipeline dictionary-wise - it's actually just a small portion (at last count there were something like 20 other dictionaries in various stages of licensing / conversion) - but it should help satisfy the immediate needs of some people for a Classical / TCM dictionary, and give us time to get all of the other stuff we're working on ready.
Specific info on each title (other than Oxford, which we've been selling since 2001 and don't really have much of anything new to tell you about):
Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Classical-to-modern Chinese dictionary from 上海辞书出版社, known as both the 《古汉语大词典》 and the 《古代汉语大词典》。 (same contents, different cover) $29.95. We've put a LOT of work into cleaning this up (in fact it's the most we've ever spent on a dictionary data file conversion), but there are still a few limitations:
Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: 《朗文中文高級新辭典（第二版）》 $24.95. This one's not directly in response to user requests like Classical, but it's another excellent title which we hope many of you will find useful. It's a monolingual traditional-character-only dictionary from Hong Kong, which, rather ironically, only includes Mandarin and not Cantonese readings (does have Cantonese for single characters, but since our software doesn't support searching that yet we've left it out for now); we hope to add Cantonese readings to it ourselves in the future, though. We have a number of other Cantonese titles coming that do include Cantonese readings already - this just happened to be the first thing ready to release, as it was the first Cantonese-friendly dictionary that we licensed (so long ago that our original licensing contact at that publisher has now moved to a different publisher and has already licensed us several other Cantonese dictionaries from that new publisher's catalog
). It's completely traditional-only, and like the Classical dictionary it may stay that way in its definitions / examples; however, we are working to add simplified support to headwords at least.
Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine by Nigel Wiseman and Ye Feng, $49.95. This is a dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine (though we're hoping to have an announcement on the Western medical dictionary front soon), and actually it's more of a "medical reference" rather than just a dictionary; goes into a great deal of detail (often several pages) on the ~6700 terms it covers. For that reason we'd recommend using an iPad as your primary viewer for it - works fine on an iPhone too, but you'll have to do a lot of scrolling. It's not cheap, but it runs less than half of what the printed edition costs (if you can even find it), and this is actually considerably improved from that edition with several thousand new terms and lots of updates / corrections by Wiseman himself. So if you're a professional TCM practitioner / student it should be a truly wonderful thing to have in electronic format.
Chinese Medicine Term List also developed by Wiseman & co; this is free and covers a lot more words than PDCM, but just gives you the translation without any explanations. Also, at the moment it's Chinese-to-English only - for English searches you'll have to go full-text. But again, extremely useful if you're in the TCM field, and you can't beat the price.
(link offline, on sale officially now)
to immediately get access to our 5 "Early Access" new dictionaries, including our long-awaited first Classical Chinese one. If you've previously purchased Oxford and transferred your license to iPhone from Palm/WM but Oxford nonetheless shows up as a demo version, go into Settings / Manage Registration / Check for new purchases and it should automatically activate.
On Android, links to manually download / purchase the 4 new dictionaries (no Oxford since that's already available officially):
Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Download / Buy
Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: Download / Buy
Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine: Download / Buy
Chinese Medical Terms List (free): Download
Note that on Android, the links in Longman and PDCM will be a bit wonky - the Longman ones are fixed in the current beta version (see Android forum) and the PDCM ones will be fixed in the next beta version. Links should all work OK in our current iOS app, though. Also, these haven't been updated to use the Android beta version's new character variant format, so all of these dictionaries will behave a bit funny in merged searches in that (won't always merge correctly, especially in Longman) - fixes coming shortly for that.
I should stress right away that this is not by any means all that we have in the pipeline dictionary-wise - it's actually just a small portion (at last count there were something like 20 other dictionaries in various stages of licensing / conversion) - but it should help satisfy the immediate needs of some people for a Classical / TCM dictionary, and give us time to get all of the other stuff we're working on ready.
Specific info on each title (other than Oxford, which we've been selling since 2001 and don't really have much of anything new to tell you about):
Gu Hanyu Da Cidian: Classical-to-modern Chinese dictionary from 上海辞书出版社, known as both the 《古汉语大词典》 and the 《古代汉语大词典》。 (same contents, different cover) $29.95. We've put a LOT of work into cleaning this up (in fact it's the most we've ever spent on a dictionary data file conversion), but there are still a few limitations:
- Traditional characters: the dictionary was originally in simplified - might seem odd, but normal for Classical dictionaries published in the mainland (in fact this is one of the more traditional-friendly ones), and an awful lot of the Classical Chinese texts floating around (both electronically and in print) are also in simplified. It did include detailed simplified-to-traditional mappings (with specific info on which traditional characters to use in multi-character entries when a single character maps to more than one), and with those we were able to do what we think was a very solid job of covering both character sets in headwords; you should be able to enter words (or look them up in the document reader) reliably in both character sets.
Definitions in the dictionary did not include traditional at all, but after initially releasing it with definitions forced to be simplified only we got a lot of feedback suggesting that people would prefer even imperfect traditional characters over simplified-only, so we duly ran the simplified text through a simplified-to-traditional converter and included the result; it's decidedly imperfect, and we don't really have the resources to go through and hand-correct every entry (particularly with the added complexity of doing that for Classical Chinese instead of modern), but it should let you avoid simplified at least. We have two other, more traditional-oriented Classical dictionaries in line for later this year if you find this unsatisfactory, though.
- Pinyin: the dictionary didn't include any Pinyin for multi-character entries, and while that may not be particularly critical anyway (it's not like they were speaking Modern Standard Mandarin when they were writing this stuff), we nonetheless filled it in as well as we could from the single-character Pinyin readings (using both external sources and additional data in the dictionary to fill in). So again, not perfect but should be pretty solid and we'll certainly keep improving it. Also, many characters have more than one Pinyin reading but only show up with the most common one in the dictionary; this is because our current app doesn't have good support for assigning multiple Pinyin readings to the same entry, but we've added that support for our big update so it'll be corrected then.
- Rare characters: there are a number of characters in here that are so rare that they're not part of any Chinese character encoding standard (even the new Unicode Extension C) and hence not supported by any Chinese font. We've actually gone to the trouble to make bitmap images for all of those (over 1000 in all) - we're getting better about that in general, our long-awaited new-edition Guifan update is probably going to have them too - but our current app doesn't know how to display embedded images in dictionary entries, so they'll be added in a future release.
Some other characters are too rare for the iPhone / Android Chinese fonts, but will be displayed if you install the Stroke Order Diagrams add-on (which also acts as a fallback font), and some characters are common enough to display with a normal Chinese font but won't be searchable with our handwriting recognizer / radical input; the recent update to our handwriting input on iOS has improved matters a good bit on that front (make sure to enable support for very rare characters in Settings / Panels) but it's still not perfect. All of this should continue to improve in future releases, but we're constrained at the moment by the whole "early access" thing since we're releasing a new database for our old app.
Longman Advanced Chinese Dictionary: 《朗文中文高級新辭典（第二版）》 $24.95. This one's not directly in response to user requests like Classical, but it's another excellent title which we hope many of you will find useful. It's a monolingual traditional-character-only dictionary from Hong Kong, which, rather ironically, only includes Mandarin and not Cantonese readings (does have Cantonese for single characters, but since our software doesn't support searching that yet we've left it out for now); we hope to add Cantonese readings to it ourselves in the future, though. We have a number of other Cantonese titles coming that do include Cantonese readings already - this just happened to be the first thing ready to release, as it was the first Cantonese-friendly dictionary that we licensed (so long ago that our original licensing contact at that publisher has now moved to a different publisher and has already licensed us several other Cantonese dictionaries from that new publisher's catalog
). It's completely traditional-only, and like the Classical dictionary it may stay that way in its definitions / examples; however, we are working to add simplified support to headwords at least.Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine by Nigel Wiseman and Ye Feng, $49.95. This is a dictionary of Traditional Chinese Medicine (though we're hoping to have an announcement on the Western medical dictionary front soon), and actually it's more of a "medical reference" rather than just a dictionary; goes into a great deal of detail (often several pages) on the ~6700 terms it covers. For that reason we'd recommend using an iPad as your primary viewer for it - works fine on an iPhone too, but you'll have to do a lot of scrolling. It's not cheap, but it runs less than half of what the printed edition costs (if you can even find it), and this is actually considerably improved from that edition with several thousand new terms and lots of updates / corrections by Wiseman himself. So if you're a professional TCM practitioner / student it should be a truly wonderful thing to have in electronic format.
Chinese Medicine Term List also developed by Wiseman & co; this is free and covers a lot more words than PDCM, but just gives you the translation without any explanations. Also, at the moment it's Chinese-to-English only - for English searches you'll have to go full-text. But again, extremely useful if you're in the TCM field, and you can't beat the price.
