Giant Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary Slated For Sept. Release

[Kobo-Daishi]

Dear all,

Here is a snippet from an August 25, 2010 article titled "Oxford Readies Giant Chinese-English Dictionary" from the Wall Street Journal web site's China Realtime Report blog:

Five years, 60 editors and translators, 300,000 words, 370,000 translations: It all adds up to the largest single volume English-Chinese, Chinese-English dictionary ever put together, due to be published Sept. 9 by Oxford University Press.

XXXXX

Oxford Readies Giant Chinese-English Dictionary

Can hardly wait to get a copy.

Kobo-Daishi, PLLA.

[Don_Horhe]

I've only read the review Kobo-Daishi gave and already love it!

[Kenny同志]

Can hardly wait to get a copy.

Same here! Seems extremely good.

[tooironic]

And the question will be, does it include 囧?

[liuzhou]

"Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei interviews Julie Kleeman, editor of Oxford's new Chinese-English English-Chinese dictionary. Shot and edited by Janek Zdzarski"

also on Tudou at http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/Y_xu2HlcZ2s/

[uberchris]

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/language/reference/dictionaries/bilingual/chinese/9780199207619.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend#

Comes out 9th September, and at 2,064 pages, I can't resist getting a copy.

[Don_Horhe]

OMG, I need to get my hands on one right NOW. :wacko:

Here's its official OUP web page: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/academic/language/reference/dictionaries/9780199207619.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend

[liuzhou]

Only £29.25 from Amazon UK. A bargain methinks.  

[Don_Horhe]

Thanks for the tip! I'm pre-ordering for my birthday.

[James Johnston]

I find it difficult to get excited about a paper dictionary. However good it is, I have to wonder if I would bother to look things up in it. I see the front cover says 'wherever you are' in front of a power button so I assume that means there will be a web version as well, which is good news.

[anonymoose]

I already have the Chinese-English dictionary published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press that OUP are cooperating with, and it's a very good dictionary, so this new dictionary is bound to be quite good also.

However, I use Chinese-English much more than the other way round, and since discovering nciku.com, rarely use the paper dictionary any more, so I probably won't be purchasing this new publication.

[liuzhou]

According to Julie Kleeman, the dictionary editor, an electronic version of the dictionary will be available. While she says she uses electronic dictionaries, she also makes a strong case for paper dictionaries.

See the Danwei interview at one of the links above.

I, too use both both online and paper dictionaries all the time, depending on what I am doing. 

[Yang Rui]

A paper dictionary will never be able to hold the same amount of information as an electronic dictionary simply because you can only make a book so big without it falling apart. On an electronic dictionary you can mouse over characters in the example sentences provided to see how they are pronounced, whereas a paper dictionary will never be able to provide pinyin for all the example sentences because it would take up so much space.

Having said that, I have found that the sheer process of looking up characters by stroke order in a paper dictionary is integral to learning characters, and really consolidating them in my mind. I don't believe electronic dictionaries provide the same depth of experience. So I think the two can happily exist side by side, complementing each other.

I'm sure this big Oxford dictionary will become a must have for anyone at intermediate level or above. Seems reasonably priced too.

[anonymoose]

I watched the interview. That's how I knew about who they were cooperating with.

I don't disagree about paper dictionaries. As I said, I have the Chinese-English one.

But since I rarely use English-Chinese, and when I do, I have the internet at my disposal, I don't see what additional benefit I'd get by buying the new Oxford dictionary. Maybe I'll change my mind when I've had a chance to look at it, but I can't see it being particularly useful to me given the resources I already have.

[renzhe]

I am a very technically minded person and I love the ease of looking things up online. I'll usually try an online dictionary (like nciku or mdbg) before consulting a paper one.

Having said that, there is absolutely no comparison between a good (!!!) paper dictionary (like this one) and an online one. If you like the Chinese language, you will purchase a good paper dictionary. There are thousands of important words in there which you can't find in nciku or any other Chinese-English dictionary. I'm surprised so many people disagree. While reading challenging texts, or annotating TV shows, there are hundreds of words I could only find in a printed dictionary, and not in any printed ones. The printed dictionary (New Century -- I'm pretty sure that this is the one anonymoose is referring to) also typically had better translations.

The only exception is when you get a paid subscription to the online version of a printed paper dictionary, like this one offers. Then you get the same thing, but can't use it if you're not online.

I don't know how this dictionary compares to the New Century Chinese-English dictionary I own, but it's great to have another heavyweight contender.

[xianhua]

This looks like a strong contender for my Amazon wishlist. Call me an old romantic, but seeing something on paper, as opposed to a computer screen, is much more appealing on the eye. Since I spend 8 hours a day at work staring at a computer screen, it's a real pleasure to have a break from the constant electronic information overload. I also find myself more likely to 'get lost' in a paper dictionary: I'll start with one word, glance down all its uses before chuckling at a totally random idiom (which doesn't usally work well in English at all). I also enjoy playing open-a-random-page-and-see-how-many-words-I-know game.

[querido]

Amazon.com says "in stock", $54.

[creamyhorror]

Having said that' date=' there is absolutely no comparison between a good (!!!) paper dictionary (like this one) and an online one. If you like the Chinese language, you will purchase a good paper dictionary. There are thousands of important words in there which you can't find in nciku or any other Chinese-English dictionary. I'm surprised so many people disagree. While reading challenging texts, or annotating TV shows, there are hundreds of words I could only find in a printed dictionary, and not in any printed ones.[/quote']

Naw, I disagree. Quite a few decent dictionaries are/were available online, such that there's little reason to use a printed one for lookups. (I'm talking about Chinese-Chinese dictionaries as well, since Chinese-English ones are more limited in number and comprehensiveness.)

For example, Zdic has lots of obscure words and characters that you won't find on nciku: http://www.zdic.net/cd/ - and it also gives related words that share the same characters, thus being very handy for browsing.

Then there are the dictionaries that were available for use with Stardict, like 现代汉语词典，国际标准汉字大辞典，高级汉语大辞典，21世纪双向词典，小学堂中日词典，汉语成语词典 and others. Those cover mostly anything you would want to look up, except the more modern expressions (for which iCiBa and Google are excellent). The Chinese-Japanese 小学堂中日词典 in particular is excellent, containing expressions that the rest don't have. I use all of these regularly with an iPhone app that searches them simultaneously. I think most of these dictionaries have been removed from the Stardict page, but the point remains that they were electronically available.

I still have a few paper dictionaries sitting around, but they don't see much use except as bedside flipping out of boredom once every few months.

[renzhe]

Yes, if you get a pirated electronic version of a printed dictionary and use it with Stardict illegally, then you will have an electronic dictionary which matches a printed one

But you do have a point with Chinese-Chinese dictionaries. I do feel that they are better than the online Chinese-English dictionaries, and for many things, google is the best source -- especially for very recent, colloquial and culturally loaded references.

[creamyhorror]

Your jibing aside, my point is that the major printed dictionaries are all available in electronic form, so there's much less reason to buy the paper versions. (This is common in Japanese, where virtually every dictionary is available for sale in the electronic EPWING format, which you can then use in a multi-dictionary lookup program.)

In addition to Stardict, there's also Lingoes, which I hear has a good multi-dictionary lookup. Or if you want to limit yourself to web-based dictionaries, Zdic covers mostly anything that a major traditional dictionary would. I suspect it's actually the electronic form of one of the major ones.

I guess I haven't really looked at the electronic availability of Chinese-English dictionaries, but when you hit an intermediate level of learning, you should probably be relying on a major Chinese-Chinese dictionary as your mainstay anyway.