I’m not sure who did this and how, perhaps it’s mediated by English, but there are now a few online dictionaries that can translate between Hebrew and Chinese (מילון עברית סינית, מילון עברי-סיני). How odd, how wonderful.
(UPDATE 29/09/2008 : Google Translate now features full website translation from Chinese to Hebrew. Best tool ever.)
The first and most useful of all is a commercial product of an Israeli company – Babylon. Point at a word in Chinese, do a click combination (shift+click in my settings) and a translation will come up in Hebrew. I was so surprised the first time I noticed there’s a Chinese->Hebrew translation in there, I figured things have changed since I started studying Chinese and it’s probably time to do a short survey of the growing niche and available tools out there.
A terrific product, for translations from any language to any language.
Another is Dicts.info. It’s far from perfect, but it has the basics, so those looking for some very basic vocabulary might find it useful.
Hopefully, it will improve with time.
There’s also Tirgumatzik (תירגומצ’יק) which does a slightly better job, though the interface is in Hebrew.
It includes both simplified and traditional Chinese as well as a number of other exotic languages.
If you’re going to China and you’re looking for a basic chitchat dictionary with Hebrew, then Limpid’s downloadable dictionary might be useful, at least for pointing to Chinese what you want. If you want to use this for speaking, you’ll probably need to learn how to pronounce the basic Pinyin to really make the most of it. As the link in Limpid’s is broken, here’s the full working link. I hope they’ll keep it there.
If you’re looking to buy a Chinese Hebrew dictionary then you have atleast two options that I know of. One is by Israeli Peret Emanuel, and the other by Chinese Ruan Xiang (阮项)(buy it on the Chinese Amazon).
Know of any other resources to help translate between Chinese and Hebrew? let me know…
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It will look like this: Online and Offline Chinese-Hebrew Dictionaries
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Guy
| July 14th, 2008 at 7:27 am #
Great story! One correction: The man who wrote the Hebrew-Chinese dictionary is actually called Ruan Xiang (阮项).
It seems another Chinese-Hebrew dictionary is to be published soon by Peking University Press: http://www.xici.net/b84677/d56436164.htm (scroll down to Appendix 1, last title). An intriguing niche is forming indeed…
fiLi
| July 14th, 2008 at 3:12 pm #
Guy - thanks for the correction and the link. That Peking University Hebrew Studies story is very interesting
Ori
| January 11th, 2009 at 1:07 am #
I was also very surprised to see all these direct tools!
I think Google Translate does not do a direct Chinese->Hebrew translation, but rather translates it through English as an intermediary language: When you translate an entire page from Chinese to Hebrew you can see that some words (words that it didn’t manage to translate) appear in English in the final Hebrew output.