Electronic Translator

[pivoxa15]

I am looking for an electronic dictionary that will do the translations below:

English->Chinese

Chinese (pin yin or character input)->English

English->English

Chinese-(pin yin or character input)>Chinese

in an accurate and reliable manner that is also good value-for-money. So it shouldn't have any more fancy features (such as sentence translation).

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Does anyone know a good store in Melbourne that sell these machines?

Thanks

[ChinaPeace]

Pivoxa:

DO NOT buy one of the stand-alone translators. They are primarily for native-Chinese folks who need to translate to English.

Instead, the VERY BEST electronic dictionary is PlecoDict, which uses a Palm or Pocket PC platform. It is amazing, and geared toward the non-native Chinese speaker.

You can imput english, pinyin, chinese character (by drawing) or by choise of radical and stroke count. It will take hours off your study time.

You can download it at http://www.pleco.com/plecodict.html. Off course, you will need a Palm or Pocket PC if you don't already have one, but the price of a low-end Palm, added to the price of PlecoDict, is about the same as one would normally pay for the stand alone electronic dictionary, but with way more usefullness.

By the way, early on I bought an electronic Chinese-English dictionary after researching them, but it was still almost useless.

Hope that's helpfull.