I’m looking for software that could recognise chinese characters on a webpage and when i place the mouse pointer over it will pop up with the pinyin of it?
Anybody know of such ‘pop-up’ type software. It would be very handy for me when reading webpages and catching the words i don’t recognise without having to copy and paste into njstar or some website converter.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]I’m looking for software that could recognise Chinese characters on a webpage and when i place the mouse pointer over it will pop up with the pinyin of it?
Anybody know of such ‘pop-up’ type software. It would be very handy for me when reading webpages and catching the words I don’t recognise without having to copy and paste into njstar or some website converter.[/quote]
I don’t know of any pop-up software, but you can easily accomplish the same thing with the Chinese version of Microsoft Word (that is, if you can read the Mandarin phonetic symbols – it doesn’t yet do pinyin or other romanization):
- Copy and past the Chinese text in question (or any part of it) from the website into a Word document
- “Select” the text you want to know how to pronunce (the whole article or any specific character or string of text)
- In the “格式 ge2shih4” menu, click “亞洲方式配置 ya3jhou1fang1shih4pei4jhih4” and then “注音標示 jhu4yin1biao1shih44”
Word will automatically insert the phonetic symbols beside each character. Voila, you will never have to look a word up by radical or stroke number again!
Dear headhonchoII,
Here is a beta shareware program called “POPtrans” that might do the trick:
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/en/company/products/poptrans/
I haven’t tried it before since it doesn’t support Windows 95 but it might be useful for you.
Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.
This sounds like what you are looking for. I copied the details from another site. Plus doesnt work for big5 which many taiwan sites are done in. But still cool
Does anyone know any good traditional character sites not in big5?
new Firefox plugin that does on-click Chinese text annotation. Using it is as simple as pressing ‘a’ (adsotate) and then clicking on Chinese text anywhere in the browser. A small window will popup (or refresh) with the sentence annotated newsinchinese-style: mouseover for pinyin and english.
The script handles traditional and simplified Chinese and those with an inclination towards hacking should also feel free to modify it to change its behavior if desired. Feedback is more than welcome.
INSTALLATION:
(1) Install or Upgrade to Firefox v. 1.5
mozilla.com
(2) Download Greasemonkey and restart Firefox:
greasemonkey.mozdev.org/changes/0.6.4.html
(3) Visit the following page and click on the “Install” button:
adsotrans.com/downloads/adso.user.js
USAGE:
(1) Visit any page with Chinese text.
(2) Press lowercase ‘a’
(3) Click on any Chinese text.
A couple of more detailed notes:
(1) you don’t need to press ‘a’ every time you annotate Chinese text, but you do need to press it again if you have pressed any other keys in the meantime. Hitting any key but ‘a’ deactivates the service so that the plug doesn’t start popping up unexpectedly when people are typing and clicking.
(2) there are occasional places where the javascript seems to have issues picking up the text, or I find myself needing to click twice.
(3) annotation doesn’t work for webpages encoded in BIG5 yet.
What an awesome suggestion, Hann. I tried it out and it worked quite well. I’ll see how it works on Taiwan sites.
Dr Eye is worth looking into. It’s made my life a whole lot easier when dealing with Chinese.
There’s another extension for Firefox (and IE) called Hanzibar, and it works with big5.
You have to pay for the newer versions, but I have version 0.41 (which was still free), and it works OK.
Do any of you know of great programs like these that use MPS? I’m not very good at PinYin. 
For MPS what I just do is copy it to WORD and then change to one of the MPS fonts. Its super easy and works great.
Sure it doesnt ‘pop-up’ like these ones but still nice.
I would suggest using Babylon.
Check it the 30-day demo version at : babylon.com/display.php?id=1 … evel=2#995
(It does use PinYin, but for those who need something else - There’s a feature for a vocal pronounciation, with a small addon available on the site.)
Also, you can add other languages and glossaries. One cool piece of software.
Can you tell me how to remove this program? Doesn’t work as well as I had hoped.
Thanks.
INSTALLATION:
(1) Install or Upgrade to Firefox v. 1.5
mozilla.com
(2) Download Greasemonkey and restart Firefox:
greasemonkey.mozdev.org/changes/0.6.4.html
(3) Visit the following page and click on the “Install” button:
adsotrans.com/downloads/adso.user.js
USAGE:
(1) Visit any page with Chinese text.
(2) Press lowercase ‘a’
(3) Click on any Chinese text.
A couple of more detailed notes:
(1) you don’t need to press ‘a’ every time you annotate Chinese text, but you do need to press it again if you have pressed any other keys in the meantime. Hitting any key but ‘a’ deactivates the service so that the plug doesn’t start popping up unexpectedly when people are typing and clicking.
(2) there are occasional places where the javascript seems to have issues picking up the text, or I find myself needing to click twice.
(3) annotation doesn’t work for webpages encoded in BIG5 yet.[/quote]
Maybe this site is helpful for pinyin: newsinchinese.com/
The above site also has a link to here: chinese-forums.com/ -which is language study in the PRC. The forum section looks like it has a lot of info, but i haven’t dug to deep in it yet. maybe useful to someone(?).
I think jlick and a few others brought this up before, I’m playing around with it now: wenlin.com/ -It has a functioning demo.
On a Mac, you can get popup chinese translations in many apps, FireFox, Safari, for IM online chatting, editing Word docs (thought not with MS Word yet), the unix terminal, viewing PDFs, …
No clicking necessary. Just move the mouse cursor over a word.