Matthews Dictionary

[Anonymous]

I've just got pleco dict, and I've been using it non-stop. What a difference from the old days.

The dictionaries are great, but I wish that there was something more for classical Chinese into English, maybe a dictionary add-on like you have for business? The Matthews dictionary is great for this, although it is in Wade-Giles. But for those interested in studying Chinese literature who are using your product (there can't be just a few, right?) the Matthews, and heck, even the intro into Wade-Giles would probably be useful.

Is there anyway this could become an add-on dictionary?

Thanks! Fantastic product too, btw!

 

[mikelove]

Thanks!

We've actually gotten quite a few requests for a classical Chinese dictionary. There are a couple of problems with the idea, though. The biggest one is that Matthews doesn't seem to be available in an electronic format, and digitizing a dictionary of that size and complexity is somewhat beyond our abilities (and would be hard to justify cost-wise). In fact, none of the classical-Chinese-to-English dictionaries seems to be available in an electronic version. So if we did this at all it would probably be using a classical-to-modern-Chinese dictionary like the Hanyu Da Cidian or Cihai - we haven't made any progress at licensing either of those so far, but since they're both available in electronic editions, and they're both useful for modern Chinese as well as classical, there's a much better chance that we might eventually convert one of them for PlecoDict.

And beyond the dictionary issue, there would also need to be some not-insignificant changes to our software - we'd have to support a wider range of characters (there are quite a lot of classical ones that never come up in modern dictionaries and aren't part of the basic Unicode character set), not only in our dictionary engine but in the fonts and (very-expensive-to-upgrade) handwriting recognizer as well.

So it's certainly possible, but may not happen for quite a while - we really can't afford to take on a project of this size unless we can expect to make a profit on it, and I don't think the market is large enough for that yet.