Taiwan MoE Dictionary (國語辭典) for Pleco

[Yadang]

As of my checking on the 5th of May 2014, this post (posted by alex_hk90 on Aug 31, 2013) has the latest pleco-fied version.

 

 

 

I believe the story is something like that the Taiwan MoE Dictionary (國語辭典)  was released under some kind of open-source license. People hoped to get it more officially pleco-fied and released as a free add-on, but Mike said they'd have to be careful. He said:

 

"we don't mind releasing it as a free add-on, but since it's being done in a proprietary format in a commercial app, and our presumed goal in releasing it would be to motivate people to buy other stuff to go along with it, I'm not quite sure if we'd be covered by that language."

 

The above quote, as well as much more (and an ensuing discussion which I admittedly haven't read) can be found here.

 

Anyways, not sure if everyone already knew about this except for me, or if, because Mike can't go around telling people for fear of violating the open-source license that it was released under, it just hasn't gotten that much attention. It is kind of hidden away in the forums... Hopefully Mike will come along and confirm...

[skylee]

Must it be a Pleco add-on? There is already an app on this dictionary -> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.audreyt.dict.moe

[etm001]

Check out this post with the latest (as of the 5th of May, 2014) pleco-fied version.

 

 

Sorry, this wording confused me and I just wanted to clarify: the last update to MoE dictionary in that thread was by user "alex_hk90" in August 2013. As far as I can tell, no new version of that dictionary has been posted to that thread since then.

 

If I am wrong, please let me know. I use the MoE dictionary available in that thread and it's immensely helpful.

[Yadang]

 

Must it be a Pleco add-on? There is already an app on this dictionary

Ah yes - I also have that app. But I prefer to have all my dictionaries in one place if possible. Also, pleco has some really powerful search features (wildcards, full-text search, using characters/pinyin at the same time etc.) that I'm not sure that app has, although I admittedly haven't used that app very much once I found out I could use the dictionary in pleco.

 

 

 

Sorry, this wording confused me and I just wanted to clarify: the last update to MoE dictionary in that thread was by user "alex_hk90" in August 2013. As far as I can tell, no new version of that dictionary has been posted to that thread since then.

Hmmm I was wondering if that was going to cause confusion - sorry about that. What I was aiming for was so that when people found this thread, they could see when I last checked. I plan on checking every so often and changing the date... I changed the wording - does it make more sense now? Or perhaps should I just delete that and lead them to the link where they can see that it was the latest one for themselves?

[mikelove]

I'm actually not that worried about bragging about it as long as it's clear that it's something done by one of our users and not by us. The creator of that standalone app (and its iPhone counterpart) has occasionally popped in on our forums and been generally very encouraging, so we're hoping that they may eventually release it under a commercial-friendly license, or at least clarify their terms so that we can use it as long as we don't charge for it.

 

But yes, this is a very nice conversion of the MoE dictionary for Pleco and even if it's not published by us we certainly plan to do what we can to make sure people can continue using it in the future. (in fact the performance should improve considerably in Pleco 3.2 or 3.3 with the user dictionary system getting some of the same database improvements we're bringing to flashcards)

 

In general we'd really like to do a better job of supporting Taiwanese Mandarin, and the biggest obstacles to doing that have unfortunately come from Taiwan - we've been rejected by every publisher (including the MoE and the TLI) we've contacted about licensing commercial dictionaries. At some point we may have to adopt the strategy that we've lately adopted with Cantonese, developing our own content because we can't find any to license, but we'd certainly rather license something since we generally get better results for less money that way.