New Century English-Chinese Dictionary

[mikelove]

Chinese name《新世纪英汉大词典》; a new comprehensive E-C dictionary from FLTRP + Collins, published just this past winter.

 

Anybody looked at this yet? Any opinions on usefulness / accuracy? Roughly the same size / scope as our 21st Century dictionary, but a decade-and-a-half newer and with the all-important addition of English meaning disambiguations. And seemingly untainted by recent political trends; can find "Dalai Lama" and "Mount Everest," e.g., which I know for a fact have been scrubbed from recent editions of some other E-C dictionaries.

[vellocet]

Does it include the part of speech of each word?  Or does it give in to the idea endemic in academia that everyone already knows the part of speech and thus there is no need to include it in a dictionary.  

[mikelove]

Yes, does include parts of speech.

[roddy]

This came up in conversation yesterday (with someone who is more than welcome to register and post! I know you're out there). I haven't seen it, but apparently it's very good and based on the Collins Cobuild corpus.

 

So nothing first hand, but I've never seen anything come out of Collins Cobuild that hasn't been decent. And FLTRP should know what they're doing. 

[Luxi]

This may help. You can see a small sample using the book preview function in Amazon.cn

 

https://www.amazon.cn/%E6%96%B0%E4%B8%96%E7%BA%AA%E6%B1%89%E8%8B%B1%E5%A4%A7%E8%AF%8D%E5%85%B8/dp/B0011ATIRO

 

Looks pretty good.

 

Not sure if one needs an Amazon.cn account to get to the preview function, but it is (or used to be) fairly easy to open one...and having an account it might be possible to buy it from there at under 60元 （against >$100 from Amazon.com). 

 

(Having tried to buy, Amazon will sell it to me at that price against a UK credit card, but won't ship it to my UK address...)

[mikelove]

Have now reviewed it a bit more thoroughly; generally quite good, as roddy mentions they do indeed seem to be using the Collins corpus and that's much to its credit as the "skeleton" of an E-C dictionary in terms of words / senses / examples is really the trickiest part to get right. And data / formatting are super clean, really only rivaled in that regard by the E-C half of Oxford which has maybe 1/4 as many entries. Translations seem solid too, though I'm waiting for a bit more insight on that from some native Chinese speaking associates

 

Biggest annoyance so far is that it continues to exhibit the ever-present E-C dictionary flaw of not using the supplied Chinese words in example sentences; I've never been too bothered by that in practice, though, you often get a better sense of how to translate the word from looking at the sentence (even if it isn't quite the same) - particularly when there isn't an idiomatic Chinese equivalent - and in any event if it's a common word you can usually get examples for it by cross-referencing it in a C-E dictionary.

 

Still, generally quite happy with it - probably the best title I've seen in this category (comprehensive, non-learner-oriented E-C dictionaries) so far.

 

Somebody at PDAwiki.com's discussion forum has actually been reviewing entries from it in Chinese (with screenshots).

 

@Luxi - with Amazon.cn, make sure you pick Amazon themselves as the seller instead of a third party; they'll often default to a third party with a slightly cheaper price but then it'll turn out that that third party only sells in China. Amazon.cn themselves ship books quite happily to the US at least and so I'd assume they also do it to the UK. (been ordering from them a lot ever since my favorite Chinese bookstore in NY severely cut back their dictionary selection)

[mikelove]

4 months later, we've now licensed this and released it as a Pleco add-on:

 

http://www.pleco.com/2016/11/17/new-century-english-chinese-dictionary/