Popup Chinese Translator for Firefox!!

[gato]

I believe 黐 is a Cantonese character. Kingsoft's Powerword lists it as "chī, 木胶，用细叶冬青茎部的内皮捣碎制成，可以粘住鸟毛，用以捕鸟." I doubt that's what it means in Cantonese, though.

[Battosai]

Great

Works well on my Swiftfox

[xentropic]

there are waaaay more entries in the adsotrans database so id like to change which dictionary file is used in this plugin. i got the adsotrans file, but its in a SQL database...if anyone knows about SQL and can convert the entries in the database to a text file that is in the EDICT format I can switch the plugin to use that instead of just the CEDICT. i dont know much about doing this and dont have access to a computer i can install software on so this would be a great help.

[bogleg]

I could probably help with that. I need to do the same thing with the ZDT to allow me to handle the Adso database as well. Just to clarify, does it need to be in EDICT format or CEDICT format?

Chris

[nubix]

xentropic I do not know how compatible the starDict dictionaries but there are many useful dictionaries available including an idiom dictionary http://stardict.sourceforge.net/Dictionaries_zh_CN.php

[xentropic]

I just posted on version 0.1.2 on the mozilla addons site so it should show up soon, here are the changes for this version:

*This no longer conflict when installed with Japanese Perapera-kun

*Now uses the Adsotrans dictionary (which includes CEDICT) so the filesize on this update is notably larger but should have significantly more entries (thanks adsotrans.com and chris for extracting the entries from the database)

*Tone marks are displayed and exported instead of the tone numbers

*Changed the toolbar icon to the green book icon so its easier to distinguish when using both this and the Japanese Perapera-kun

looking forward to feedback and ideas for the next release, most likely that will be me making the traditional characters work correctly (sorry) and to do the same function as the japanese has when you press shift to display individual character information, i need to find a chinese character info file and parse that cause yea lots more in chinese...but yea the important things are done i think

[atitarev]

Xentropic, it still shows the 1.1 version, please double-check.

Regards,

Anatoli

[Jockster]

This plugin sounds very cool, I'm going to give it a run one of these days. Just wanted to point out a very cool tool called POPjisyo which provides pop-ups with the meaning of the word as well as that of the individual characters. It also has a very cool study list feature. It works with both Japanese and Chinese. Check it out!

http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx

[digmen1]

HI Xentropic

Your Firefox pop up is great.

You have done a great service to mankind !

I will not download your latest update 0.1.2. as I like getting the Pinyin numbers, as it makes it easy for me to type Chinese characters.

Could you make it an option in your next release to choose between Pinyin numbers and Pinyin tones ?

Kind Regards

Digby

[imron]

Digmen, just to help clarify some things for you (based also on your posts in another thread).

The tone numbers at the end of a pinyin word, have no correlation to the number you will type in a Pinyin based IME. So, seeing ni3 or nǐ shouldn't make any difference for how you type Chinese characters.

Most Pinyin IMEs don't distinguish between different tones and will put up all the characters matching a given sound (without regard for tone), and order them by likelihood of them being the character you want to use (there are several different ways an IME might guess this, and none of them are 100% accurate).

As an example, the word "you" "你" has the pinyin nǐ or ni3. But if I want to type this character using a pinyin based IME, the keys I actually type are: ni1. This is because 你 is the most frequently occurring character for the pinyin sound ni, and so it appears first in the list of choices. So, once you've typed the pinyin, you still need to check which character it is that you want to type, and the number you select probably won't be the tone number that you would write at the end of the pinyin.

Also, once you've familiarised yourself with pinyin, it is trivial to map the tone marks to the tone numbers. The first tone nī is always 1, the second tone ní is always 2, the third tone nǐ is always 3 and the fourth tone nì is always 4. Once again, these numbers have nothing to do with the number you select from a Pinyin based IME, and are used primarily because it's easier to type ni3 on a keyboard than it is to type nǐ.

All of this must be quite confusing for someone just starting out, but it soon starts to make sense :-) I would hazard a guess that most people who know pinyin prefer reading the tone marks rather than tone numbers, and only use tone numbers as a necessary evil.

So, you might want to still consider upgrading to the newer version.

[xentropic]

yea i was gonna say the same things, i thought for a second to put that option in, but i couldnt imagine why anyone would want to see a number instead of a tone mark

[atitarev]

Great job, Xentropic. Thanks for fixing it for Rikaichan users.

How do one go about if you want to create a similar dictionary for another language, where do you get the source code?

Here it says you can get it from the XPI file:

http://rikaichan.mozdev.org/source.html

Not sure how you extracted it.

--

Imron, Digmen. Tone numbers can be used for typing in Wenlin. It converts the pinyin to the proper tone mark, though. As Imron said, if you use pinyin, tone marks are more user-friendly look nicer than tone numbers.

[digmen1]

Hi guys

Regarding the use of Pinyin numbers and tone marks, thanks for your comments.

As a beginner to Mandarin I must accept your advise. It was just that as a beginner it seemed easier to me to use IME and the pinyin numbers. But as I wanted to list some words in pinyin tones I found the best way was to use the Word Insert Symbol feature and I have set up a keyboard shortcut for each accented vowel. This took a while but it was well worth it.

My own system for the shortcuts is

Alt A (for accute) A, E, I, O or U

Alt G (for grave French) A, E, I, O or U

Alt M (for macron) A, E, I, O or U

Alt H (for hackek - Czech) A, E, I O or U

I find this system is easy to remember while you are typing in Word.

The only upsetting thing is that these Insert Symbols shortcuts only work in Word not in this forum, or in Microsoft Access database which I wanted to use. So I suppose I will have to use one of the cut and paste methods.

I did find that using the pinyin numbers I did not always get the right Chinese character, so I hope using the tones will do this for me.

Kind Regards

Digby

[imron]

I did find that using the pinyin numbers I did not always get the right Chinese character, so I hope using the tones will do this for me.

Nope, most pinyin based IMEs don't pay any attention to tones. They only care about the sound. You still have to choose/proofread the character yourself to make sure it's correct.

Unfortunately given the structure of the Chinese writing system there is just no easy way to do this. With pinyin IMEs if you can't at least read the character you want to type, there is no 100% accurate way to know that you've got the correct character.

[xentropic]

i got the unihan dictionary file which gives tons of information for each hanzi which i was going to incorporate so you can get individual character information when pressing the shift key like peraperakun(rikaichan) but not sure how would be the best way to do that.

the file size is around 5mb, so if i added it the extension would be like 11mb total, so would everyone use that feature? should i make extra effort to split the extension up so you can add what dictionary files you want? not sure how you use the extension or how you want to use it (ie what to add) so feedback on this would be appreciated.

[conrad]

ive install perkun but i dont get any pop ups and when i use the hotkeys i can only get a input window which has display problems (eg it displays under advertisements not over) Could someone tell me what ive done wrong.

Thanks

EDIT: figured it out. The creator of this is the coolest guy ive never met.

[bashFish]

wow it's really great!

But why is the description-text "popup japanese dictionary" ?

That's confusing me

[necroflux]

Hey Xentropic - any chance you could hook us up with a traditional character version of this plugin? Right now when using it with traditional characters half of the characters look the way they're supposed to, and the other half come up with some crazy dictionary entry with far too much information.

[digmen1]

Hi Xentropic

Really enjoying your pop-up !

How do we know which version we have installed ?

Kind Regards

Digby

NZ

[xentropic]

hey all, to answer alot of questions--

source code: all plugins for firefox are written in uncompiled javascript that can be found simply by going to the folder of the plugin in your profile folder and then finding the ".jar" file and renaming it to a ".zip" file then extracting the files. it took me about a day of reading how everything is designed to be able to rewrite it to work with chinese and is still very much a work in progress that i dont work on actively.

i built it because i was annoyed at the steps i had to go thru to simply find a chinese reading for the characters/words. i speak shit japanese but can read quite a bit so i think if i can add the chinese readings to my hanzi/kanji knowledge (which isnt that hard because to learn japanese you usually learn 3 or more reading for every kanji) then if i study a little bit of grammar i should be able to hack away at chinese. anyways...yea i modded it to do basically that, and it does so im happy and i use it alot now to one by one read my way thru articles and practice the readings.

i would love to actually make this for many different languages (because i study arabic, french, russian, and depending on the weather hindi) but it is more difficult because you need to deconjugate words in most languages to get them to dictionary form in order to look them up, but would love to help/love to encourage people to create those because it wasnt hard for me to mod this for chinese and was surprised it wasnt already done when the personal need for it surfaced.

i am pretty much waiting for the rikaichan guy to mod the plugin for firefox 2.0 then i will re-mod that (via copy-paste:) ) and release it. i was a computer science major but loathe programming and dont wanna do it if someone else will...so thatll be released a few days after he releases it.

here are the other things i plan to add in that release:

* traditition character support (not hard to fix...but i find that i either spend time preparing to study languages more than actually studying...so i havent programmed for awhile in lue to actually study chinese)

*remove some unneeded things from the options menu via a complaint the dialog was too big

*hopefully add a thing so like when theres a few words displayed you can press 1,2,or 3 and save the respective entry to file instead of always the first one...

*hopefully a better dictionary!!! i am still not happy at all with the amount of misses but cant do much about it myself...so yea...

*add the unihan dictionary so you actually get pertitant information about the hanzi and not leftovers form the kanji info in the japanese version

wow that list is longer than i expected.....um maybe all that wont happen when i update for firefox 2.0 but they are things i plan on doing when not studying....so thanks for all your feedback, and ill see what i can do as far as updating is concerned...later

by the way...if anyone knows a place where i can find like simple stories in chinese on teh web or something to read that isnt like sino-japan-korean nuclear news id rather learn those words instead...so please do tell