New Century Chinese-English Dict?

举人
Hi all, I've been happily surprised by the depth of the recently released New Century English- Chinese dictionary, particularly in regards to "modern terms" like "bromance 兄弟情" etc. On searching online I found the paper edition for the opposite direction.

https://world.tmall.com/item/534207...0967972-13112510360.41.6zcZ8P&id=534207398349
(in the bio it mentions the CAATI translation test, which is of interest to an (amateur) translator like me)

It got me thinking, as far as I'm aware the most recently published Chinese to English dict of similar quality would be the Oxford- FLTRP Chinese- English in 2010 (please tell me if I'm wrong.) While granted 6 years isn't a long time in dictionary years, I would like something a little more up to date. Would Pleco be looking into licensing New Century Chinese- English to accompany the recent release? Or perhaps something similar?

Regards
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks!

Oxford is actually based on the first edition of New Century, so we've got most of the content from it in Pleco anyway thanks to that. Our PLC dictionary is based on FLTRP's other big Chinese-English title 《汉英词典》for which we've licensed and will soon at very long last be releasing the latest 3rd edition, so we've got even more of FLTRP's C-E data in our app via that. (not to mention 《现代汉语规范词典》 as another title coming from their corpus)

So we'll certainly take a look at this new edition of New Century C-E once we get our hands on a print copy, but it actually wasn't the only new comprehensive C-E dictionary published recently - there's another one that came out of a collaboration between Collins and a different Chinese publisher, plus there's a new edition of the famous 《新时代汉英词典》- and while FLTRP are wonderful long-time partners of ours, if we're going to license yet another new C-E dictionary we'd generally rather get one with as little overlap with our existing dictionaries as possible.
 
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举人
Great, Thanks for the reply. I'll be sure to keep my eyes peeled for any future releases!
 

timseb

进士
Any chance of this reaching Pleco? Apart from not offering both character sets it's so far easily the best C-E dictionary I've used. Sure, I see the connection with Oxford mostly when it comes to example sentences, but the amount of sentences, and more importantly the quality of the definitions, are much better in New Century.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's a great dictionary, but the big question for me is still how to sell it - I don't think it's something we could justify the license fee for without including it in a bundle, but at the same time, I'm not sure whether it would really generate a lot of extra sales of Professional when we already include three other C-E dictionaries in that bundle including the Oxford with its very similar definitions/examples + the very comprehensive ABC.
 

timseb

进士
That's a shame, but I totally understand the reasoning behind it. Hopefully I'll find a way to open their Android app in my emulator.
 
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