I have written a Web-based program which, given a string of Chinese text, looks up the words in CEDICT and annotates the characters with their pronunciation in Mandarin and meaning in English. It could be described as a cross between a dictionary look-up tool and a translator, but it’s easier to explain with screenshots:
It can show pronunciation in several romanisation systems, thanks to Cranky Laowai’s conversion tables, and it can apply Ironlady’s Tonally Orphographic Pinyin to any of them (except BoPoMoFo which doesn’t have upper/lower case letters).
It can also function as a more conventional dictionary:
…and convert between traditional and simplified characters, either as part of the annotation process or separately:
The main obstacle remaining to putting this program online (it’ll be free and open-source) is giving it a name - so I’m asking people here for ideas. So far I have called it 中文電翻譯 (‘Chinese electr[on]ic translator’), but I don’t actually know enough Chinese to be sure if that is correctly formed, or if it sounds or looks like anything else. It would be preferable to have a name that’s not just a literal description of what the program does, and is easily pronouncable by an English speaker. This seems a silly thing to ask because with software any name will do (“Windows”, “Word” etc.) but I just can’t think of anything!
Also, note that the traditional/simplified converter page and navigation bar have Chinese text on them; this is because the converter might be useful to native speakers who don’t know English. The Chinese text was written with Babelfish followed by a quick sanity check with this program, so it will undoubtedly contain a few errors and I’d appreciate any corrections.
You have two two-character (disyllabic) words - 中文 Zhongwen and 翻譯 fanyi - with a one-character (monosyllabic) word - 電 dian - sandwiched in between them. That does not fit with the natural rhythm of the Chinese language. You should use 電子 dianzi instead of 電 dian.
Does it have to be a Chinese name?
I think an English or English-like name would be more universally acceptable, since most Chinese can handle English names, while most English-speakers can’t. You might have some beginning students interested in this as well, and Chinese character names might be beyond them.
Cool program. I don’t know what to call it, though.
I agree with Ironlady – there’s no reason you have to have a Chinese name for this; the main users will be foreign learners of Chinese, I presume. I would suggest the “Nimbus 2007”, unless Rowling has a copyright on ‘nimbus’.
Or, more descriptively, something like Sinotool, Sinoreader, etc. Those are taken (you can Google for them) but a bit of creativity in that direction might help, e.g., The Sinocruncher!
Thanks for pointing that out; I did wonder about it briefly.
[quote=“ironlady”]Does it have to be a Chinese name?
I think an English or English-like name would be more universally acceptable, since most Chinese can handle English names, while most English-speakers can’t. You might have some beginning students interested in this as well, and Chinese character names might be beyond them.[/quote]
Yes, an English name would probably be better - what I meant by “easily pronouncable by an English speaker” was either an English or bits-of-English-words-strung-together name, or a simple Chinese name written in Hanyu Pinyin - but now that I think about it, any Chinese name will be intimidating for a newcomer.
Rick Harbaugh’s dictionary Zhongwen Zipu (中文字譜) has a Chinese name, but I guess that’s suitable for it since it is a character dictionary! (and probably the people who read it will know more than many people who will use this program.)
I decided to call this program “Sinodecoder”. Thanks to Dragonbones for pointing me in that direction.
However, it has sat on my hard disk for another year… I don’t live in Taiwan or China - my only experience of them was a month-long visit to China a few years ago, and the program evolved from some experimentation following that. Writing it has left me with a strange level of knowledge of Chinese - I know quite a lot of random characters, but can’t string a sentence together beyond “wo shi yingguoren”!
To be honest, I’m not likely to find the time or motivation to do any more with this program; my interest in the subject has waned, and between a 9-to-5 job and other interests, it always gets put on the back burner.
Hence this plea for further help: Is anyone here willing to host and maintain Sinodecoder? I would be willing to pay some (maybe all) of the cost of hosting it, it’s more the maintaining bit that’s the problem. Although I might just about manage to put it online myself, there will probably be requests for fixes and new features, which I wouldn’t be able to handle.
Sinodecoder is written in Python, and interfaces to the Apache web server through mod_python. It also consumes more than 100MB of RAM; unfortunately the number of hosting companies that can meet these requirements is limited. If anyone is interested, I’ll discuss the technical issues further and give what help I can with setting it up. Here’s a copy of the source code.
