The best tools to help you with your Chinese studies and translations

Are you studying Chinese? Are you translating between English and Chinese? software can make your life a whole lot easier. Being frustrated with seeing my fellow Chinese language students getting lost in old-style dictionaries and unsuccessfully guessing stroke order and pronounciation I invited those interested to a short presentation last week at the Hebrew University where I showed a few commercial and free tools I know that I thought might help Chinese students and translators.

Here’s a summary of the applications that I reviewed in the presentation, including links and small screenshots. There are a lot more, but I believe this includes the best of the tools available. I’d be happy to get comments about the software that you’re using and your recommendation.

Commercial tools

• Wenlin – In my opinion, the best software you can find for Chinese. It has a comprehensive dictionary with numerous ways to look up a character you don’t know and countless other features I use daily. For a more extensive review of Wenlin’s features, see my previous "Wenlin".

• Dr. Eye – Taiwanese software technology at its best. Dr. Eye has the most amazing Chinese related tools for just about anything that you use on your computer. Dr. Eye provides instant translation by hoovering, instant writing, an extensive dictionary, an IME for Chinese input (with audio), instant voice, full-text translation, website and instant-messeging translation etc.

• Babylon – Israeli software that revolutunized on-PC translation, enabling click-and-translate from almost any language to any language on any application, Chinese included ofcourse, and there are additional glossaries and free dictionaries contributed by organizations and individuals that you probably won’t find in usual dictionaries, like direct German-Chinese translations, Chinese idioms, Chinese phonetics, Tai Chi terms, Chinese medicine terms etc.

• NJStar – A complete Chinese-English wordpressesor with some interesting features. Includes a dictionary, Chinese text-to-speech, handwriting recognition, a Chinese font collection etc.

• Key5 – "includes a word processor (both Traditional & Simplified characters, with accurate bidirectional conversion between the two modes), our continuously updated 250,000-term Chinese/English dictionary, our Text-To-Speech module, and numerous teaching and learning features like automated setting of Pinyin-with-tonemarks, glossary-building, timed reading, building of cloze exercises, etc.". For a review and comparison to Wenlin, take a look at the Taiwanese based Prince Roy blog.

Free tools

• ZDT – An amazing open-source tool for Chinese. Includes an annoator, flashcard memory games, a dictionary

• Dimsum – Chinese Reading Assistant and Dictionary

• Cquicktrans – A dictionary with radical breakdown and flashcards.

• Wakan – Mandarin Tools’ Chinese tools collection.

• Chinese homework trainer – create and manage Chinese studylists.

Firefox extensions

There are quite a few Firefox extensions to help you with reading Chinese online. The full list I previously wrote about is available in "Top Firefox extensions to help you read Chinese online", but of all the extensions, I recommend 3. In order to use those you’ll first need to download and install Firefox, and then click on the links and press on "install" :

• FoxLingo provides full webpage translation using all possible translation sites (Google, Altavista, etc.) through an easy to use toolbar.

• ChinesePera-kun is an excellent tool that "will popup the pinyin reading and English definition when you mouse over Chinese in Simplified or Traditional characters."

• ImTranslator has a small box interface to translate to/from Chinese. There’s a  nice useful feature of double-translation, translating to Chinese and then back again to give you a feel of what was changed or lost during the translation.