best chinese translation software for tabletpc as travel tool?

[mkstoewgnv]

Hi, in a week (Aug 14) I'm off to southern China (mostly rural Hunan and Guizhou provinces). My companion and I will be carrying the Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook, but we have never studied Chinese. However I spent 4 years studying written Japanese, and I have a new tabletpc (HP tc4200) which with the 'recognizer pack' understands Chinese and Japanese writing input (the screen is the input tablet in a variation of the Windows XP environment, for those not familiar with tabletpcs).

I am willing to pay up to a few hundred dollars for a translation program, but learning Chinese is not my main goal as I do not envision having the time.

I want to use the tablet to translate English requests to Chinese for traveling.

I want to input Chinese that I see on signs to facilitate navigation and shopping - a dictionary that understood place names and personal names and the Pinyin/pronunciation would be ideal if one exists.

It may be unattainable but I could imagine in an unhurried private context, meeting with a fellow biologist for example, passing the tabletpc back and forth, inputting our respective languates and having a conversation.

In the long run, I would love to be able to translate Cantonese as well as Mandarin web sites to aid in electronics shopping.

And if the software also translated Japanese for the scientific texts I try to read occasionally that would be great too.

All of this would probably require more than one program. Any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated. There is probably just enough time to get second day air delivery for outlets selling the software in the US (online downloads and payment would be even better).

Thanks so much for your help, Mark

[geraldc]

I think you're over engineering a translation solution.

Hand writing recognition is pretty temperamental, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, plus software translation packages are notoriously poor. Peoples names can form small phrases etc, so it can very easily go wrong.

You'd be better off pointing to the phrase you want in your guidebook, rather than booting up your laptop and trying to write and translate conversations on the fly, and when you need a translator/guide, just try and hire one through your hotel.

If you do take your tablet and do attempt to use it as you've previously mentioned, make sure you have very comprehensive travel insurance...

[atitarev]

The worst phrasebooks are from Lonely Planet - IMHO - in the Mandarin Chinese phrasebook they try to anglicize the pronunciation, no tonemarks, if you are exposed to pinyin just a little - you get very confused and typos are everywhere. Dialogs in the book are hard to link to the phrases in the book. If you learn Chinese from a textbook a little and then look at the phrasebook again, you will know what I mean. There are a lot of more decent phrasebooks.

BTW, The Cantonese phrasebook is a complete disaster. Phrases are written in Mandarin - using standard words but pronunciation is in Cantonese.

[Jive Turkey]

mkstoewgnv,

I think you'd be better off saving that money and then just hiring an escort interpreter once you arrive in China. Machine translation generally produces unintelligible crap. Even for non-idiomatic language, translation software is not reliable.

[mkstoewgnv]

I appreciate everyone's responses and understand the reasons for them, but I have enough experience to know that the computer could be useful even while being far from perfect. I have used the handwriting recognition on the tablet and it is surpisingly good even for very complex kanji - I would guess 85% of characters are consistently recognized the first time while the remainder may take several tries.

The tablet also allows all the numerous common keyboard input methods as well, and it would probably be worth my while to learn one of them so that I can look up characters after this trip is over - particularly while reading Japanese (and maybe someday Chinese) scientfic texts.

Is there a keyboard input system for Chinese that is very similar to one used for Japanese? (making it easy to learn how to look up characters in both languages). All I know is the Japanese Nelson dictionary lookup system.

Of course in a few years all the new and eventually all the older scientific literature will be on line, and I won't need to input characters.

But I could still use a recommendation for translation software - word by word can get one the gist of an electronics website. Even the butchered translations produced by google and babelfish are useful, particularly in commercial and scientific contexts where you easily predict most of what they must be saying.

I will consider hiring local help but it is going to be an adhoc unusual sort of trip and it would be unusual luck to quickly get someone who would fit the ticket.

Still any recommendations for a very basic dictionary package?

Thanks and best wishes, Mark

[gato]

http://board.verycd.com/t191237.html

Since the program is in Chinese, you'll need to enable "East Asian language support" in Windows to install and use.

You might find it helpful to purchase both a good Chinese-to-English and a English-to-Chinese dictionary (they are usually sold separately) and learn how to look up Chinese characters through radicals. You don't want to boot up your computer every time you need to look up a word.

[mkstoewgnv]

Just to clarify - it is unnecessary to boot up the laptop to use it - it stays in my back pack in a power saving state - when I need it, I slip it out and it comes instantly to life with a touch of the screen. With the travel battery it is good for 11 hours of continuous use, it will go for days without recharging (possibly the whole trip) if removed for light use occasionally. I waited for the technology to improve to this point and chose this model because it was optimal for this purpose.

Any translating program recommendations?

[gato]

You didn't check the link I posted?

[柯賜海]

I'm drunk right now so I didn't actually read the bit where the op said why they wanted it...anyway, BABYLON is hands down the best translation tool I have ever seen. I work in translation and know betterthan to use machine translation for whle documents..Babylon is a great dictionary- better than kingsofts thuingy..and also better than dr eye by a million miles..I will check back tomorrow to see if anything i just write made sense

www.babylon.com