Sentence Translation?

[Drakling]

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this program existed, as i've been looking for a good pocket translator, and most of them did not have accessible pinyin translations. That said, i've been looking at the manual and screenshots and haven't been able to find out if its possible to translate SENTENCES from English to pinyin (e.g. "i have a small dog -> "wo you xiao gou"). Does anyone know if this is possible?

Thanks and keep up the great work.

 

[mikelove]

I'm afraid that's not possible - that sort of automated translation is extremely difficult, it's the sort of thing that companies like Google and Microsoft put teams of researchers to work on but it's well beyond the capabilities of a small developer like Pleco. (Google's free online translator is pretty good, though, http://www.google.com/language_tools)

 

[Drakling]

Thanks for the quick response. That's too bad, but the other benefits of your program are enough to outweigh that factor and you'll still be getting my business!

 

[ipsi]

I also wouldn't be surprised if the amount of data processing/storage needed is a bit beyond the capacity of most handheld devices at the moment. But yeah, it's way out of Plecos league, sad to say.

I'm also not sure I've ever seen a downloadable translation program, so it could be that there's only the online ones available (at least, if you're looking for a 'good' translation engine anyway). Though I think Adso is looking into maybe releasing something for download, but that could just be my imagination, and even then it would likely only be for PC.

 

[mikelove]

Downloadable translators do exist, actually: http://www.systransoft.com/. But yes, PDAs are a bit lacking in processor/storage capacity for the moment, though the gap is getting smaller every year.

 

[_iOn_]

A friend of mine has an electronic dictionnary that does sentence translation, and seeing the size and the price of the thing, I can safely guess it's slower and has less buit-in memory than the majority of the PDAs on the market (but of course, it's a dedicated, and probably highly optimized device).

The results are not too bad, at least from what's I've seen, and if it's not perfect, it still helps getting the global meaning of a sentence.

I could get the device's reference if anyone's interested, I think it's made by a chinese brand, not sure though, but it was bought in China, that's for sure.

 

[mikelove]

Oh they can certainly churn out passable results, even the algorithmically very simple Adsotrans does a pretty decent job at conveying the meaning of sentences by making context-dependent translations of words, but getting them to work well is a different story. And I'm not sure if this is really a direction we want to go anyway - Pleco now is pretty specifically oriented around people leaning Chinese, most of the improvements in 2.0 are designed for that goal, but once we get into translation there are a whole different set of requirements and I worry the learning-related part of the software might suffer as a result.

Plus, much like word-by-word translation it seems like the sort of thing that could ultimately do more harm than good for one's Chinese abilities; if the handheld does all of the work for you you're never going to have an incentive to memorize more than a few very very common characters. For international business / political types who have to juggle half a dozen different languages at once or otherwise can't spend the time to really work on their Chinese, a translator is a fine thing, but if you're really focusing on Chinese specifically I think you'll be much better off with a tool that makes the annoying / labor-intensive stuff easier but still leaves a lot of the work up to you.