Mandarin, Cantonese and that's all?

Mehdi

举人
I was just thinking why Pleco limits itself to only this two "languages", why do not open to other Chinese dialects like 闽南话,客家,潮州话,赣话. Or at least add these dialects transcriptions.

I think it's good idea, but I am sure Pleco team has already thought about it, anyway this is my two cents...
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
4.0 will definitely include (= already have implemented this in test builds) support for user dictionary databases with fully custom romanizations, so it'll be a lot easier to load and search a user-made dialect dictionary in that.

The reason we don't officially support those at the moment is the lack of much good data for us to license on them - few open-source titles of debatable provenance and/or commercial-use legality and not much else. Cantonese is the only one so far for which we've seen sufficient demand that we were able to justify spending money hiring editors to do something ourselves. (I'm doubtful we could raise sufficient funds via a Kickstarter or some such either - Wenlin did raise $60k for their Cantonese website but that dictionary already existed + would have cost a heck of a lot more than $60k to develop from scratch)
 

Abun

榜眼
4.0 will definitely include (= already have implemented this in test builds) support for user dictionary databases with fully custom romanizations, so it'll be a lot easier to load and search a user-made dialect dictionary in that.
Awesome, I can’t wait!

Does this mean that maybe there is still hope for an official version of the MoE Minnan and Hakka dictionaries on the basis of the same license as the Mandarin one?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The goal in 4.0 is that there'd no longer be any significant benefit to an official over a user-created dictionary, i.e., you won't need our version of those dictionaries because a user-created one will support all of the same formatting / variants / etc and be comparably fast.

Official support is dicey because it'd require quite a bit of extra coding to support those romanization systems in official databases, for something we'd be giving away for free - we were able to justify that with Cantonese because we also had several paid Cantonese dictionaries to offer (and more coming), but unless somebody comes out with a line of paid Minnan / Hakka / etc dictionaries or MoE changes their license to allow us to charge for them it would be tough to make that a priority over the several years' worth of other items on our to-do list.
 

alex_hk90

状元
The goal in 4.0 is that there'd no longer be any significant benefit to an official over a user-created dictionary, i.e., you won't need our version of those dictionaries because a user-created one will support all of the same formatting / variants / etc and be comparably fast.

Official support is dicey because it'd require quite a bit of extra coding to support those romanization systems in official databases, for something we'd be giving away for free - we were able to justify that with Cantonese because we also had several paid Cantonese dictionaries to offer (and more coming), but unless somebody comes out with a line of paid Minnan / Hakka / etc dictionaries or MoE changes their license to allow us to charge for them it would be tough to make that a priority over the several years' worth of other items on our to-do list.
I'm looking forward to trying out the new user dictionary features in Pleco 4.0. :)
 

Abun

榜眼
Official support is dicey because it'd require quite a bit of extra coding to support those romanization systems in official databases, for something we'd be giving away for free - we were able to justify that with Cantonese because we also had several paid Cantonese dictionaries to offer (and more coming), but unless somebody comes out with a line of paid Minnan / Hakka / etc dictionaries or MoE changes their license to allow us to charge for them it would be tough to make that a priority over the several years' worth of other items on our to-do list.
That’s understandable. I have to hope for such a dictionary to come around then :)
 
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