A good English-Chinese Electronic dictionary

[halcat]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a decent electronic dictionary for translating English into Chinese please? I do not need one that has MP3 player and tons of extras, just one that does a good translation of words and can be audible as well please? I’m sure there must be something cheaper than 1,000 NT$, which is all I have seen so far.

Many thanks.

[Chris]

What do you mean by “translating”?

Do you want a machine in which you can input an English sentence or paragraph and get Chinese? Or do you just want an English-Chinese dictionary?

[halcat]

Hi Chris,

To be honest I didn’t know you could do sentences so was just thinking of the ability to translate individual words. I assume one which will go as far as sentences would be quite a bit more expensive too, but any suggestions you have would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Joschka]

I have the Instant MD6900 which is OK, but has some annoying errors in the indexes so it can produce some wrong information in odd but minor ways:

• enter the English word: enough and translate
• get some assorted translations including the character ‘go’ which is the one I wanted
• highlight that character and press enter
  -instead of taking me to the ‘go’ character and its properties, it takes me to a completely different character, ‘she’ which does include ‘excessive’ as a definition but not what I wanted.
  (If I put in ‘go’ in Chinese, everything works.)

I have found only a very few errors like this.

shopping.com/instant-dict/products This web site shows the Instant models.

Instant is made in Taiwan and they do have a service center in Taipei so that’s a plus. I’ve had it for a year and a half and nothing has ever broken.

[archylgp]

I’ve been using the BESTA CD-858. It retails for around 9,000 NT. Three years on and it still looks and operates like new.

[Chris]

I always liked the Besta dictionaries. One thing is that, at least as far as I have seen, they ALL come with tons of bells and whistles that I never used.

I no longer use handheld electronic dictionaries, having instead installed Dr. Eye on my computer. Dr. Eye and Besta use the same word list, both being Inventec products. Despite having hundreds of thousands of vocab words, they are still missing quite a few relatively common words, and they suffer from that perennial dictionary drawback: an incomplete range of usages.

[Hellstorm]

Does anyone know of a German/Chinese electronic dictionary? The electronic dictionaries I checked in the electronic stores just had a ridicously small dictionary, so absolutely useless. Is there anything qualitatively good avaialble?

[archylgp]

@Hellstorm

Does anyone know of a German/Chinese electronic dictionary? The electronic dictionaries I checked in the electronic stores just had a ridicously small dictionary, so absolutely useless. Is there anything qualitatively good avaialble?

A good thing is;

Models may also have memory card slots that can be used for database expansion.

So you might be able to add a German dictionary to your English-Chinese one.

Also,…

Casio looks promising. They have a website in German – casio.jp/exword/

Here’s some info on Casio:

Casio currently has 27 models on the market in Japan. They contain a range of specialized functions, including Chinese, Korean, Italian, German, Russian and English translation, Buddhist terminology dictionary, and features for both study and daily use. Several models of Casio dictionaries come with slots for inserting data cards containing additional, specialized dictionaries, such as The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary. Casio writing pads allow the user to pause as long as necessary before writing the next kanji stroke.

The MD-9288 Color might work (angelfire.com/biz/chinhtruc/ … MD9288.jpg):

10 languages dictionary includes English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese.
Animated dictionary and illustrated dictionary.
Japanese-Chinese, Chinese-Japanese, French-Chinese German-Chinese, Spanish-Chinese Dictionaries.
angelfire.com/biz/chinhtruc/chinese.html

I’ve found the “ten-language dictionaries” to be limited. I just entered “清高” into mine and there wasn’t a German entry. “明確” had one, though – “deutlich”

[Hellstorm]

I have a Casio Japanese-German-English electronic dictionary, and it is really good (from the quality of the dictionaries, not from the hardware… but luckily I don’t need MSN on my electronic dictionary). Sadly, it had cost me 270 Euros back then (now it would be more like 400 Euros). It is a little bit too large though… Nice for study, but hard to walk around with (They have an extra touchpad to write characters on the bottom under the keyboard, but this makes the whole dictionary way too large. I see the Chinese electronic dictionaries which all the Chinese students use in university much more handy).

I didn’t know Casio had a Chinese website. Unfortunately, they do not have German there… weird, I thought German was a little bit popular in China.

The German website of Casio is of no use - they only offer English, French, Spanish, Italian etc. In no way there will be an Chinese dictionary available in the next 100 years in Germany.

[JimmyTheSaint]

I use Pleco on my iPhone. It’s really good: I splurged and added on a couple of dictionaries and the OCR package, which lets me point my iPhone at some text and the program identifies each character on the fly. It runs on the iPod Touch, which is a lot less expensive than the iPhone. I see a couple of free German dictionaries available to be added on to Pleco (HanDeDict and DeHanDict). Info at pleco.com/products.html