Google Tooltip Translation...
henning
April 07, 2008, 04:54 PM posted in General DiscussionI had to switch my notebook after the old one eventually died after several months of agony. My new one came with a pre-installed "Google Toolbar", which I was just about to deinstall when I noticed that there was a "translate" option switched on that eagerly tried to translate English words into German for me.
I changed the settings and now it translates into Chinese. The classical-tooltip reversed: You place the cursor over an English word and get a list of translations.
Has several shortcomings:
- the list of possible translations is way too long
- the translations are not ordered according to usage frequency. Often very strange translations are listed first
- font size seems to be something like 4 point - ideal for people who not only have the eyes of an eagle but also the ability to infer characters from a small scale pixel clutter (and thereby beat Shannon).
But it is fun and once in a while might even give an additional learning input.
daxim
April 07, 2008, 05:22 PMPOPjisyo exists longer and therefore is not browser-integrated, but the translations are more refined. http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal_e.aspx
henning
April 07, 2008, 05:58 PMdaxim: it does not seem to have "English-->Mandarin" or did I miss something? excuter.... I agree. I would not have installed it myself, especially because I am not a friend of tooltip help. But now that it is already here it is a source of some extra fun...well, except when it suggested to translate my name with 母鸡.
excuter
April 09, 2008, 05:51 PMyep, such bad name calling from a unwanted little thing easily leads to it´s destuction... ^_^
scheu
April 09, 2008, 10:36 PM... Hi A few days ago I installed an ad-on to firefox which makes it possible to directly translate chinese text in a browser to english caracter by caracter or word by word. Very confortable to use. Called chinese pera-kun, can be downloaded at the following URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3349
guolanusa
April 10, 2008, 01:25 AM谢谢，scheu! That is too cool! (用那个addon,我可以不用我的电子词典就明白chengye和goulniky's留言！）我想去看中文网上的报纸 -- 用这个addon帮我，会学很多，不用浪费时间去查词典。太好玩儿！有没有一个addon可以帮我用手写字，或者为了做菜、打扫房子、什么的？！ : )
scheu
April 10, 2008, 02:04 PMguolanusa, 我很高兴你喜欢那个add on. 这对我也是很大的帮助。 做菜、打扫房子的add on 我还没找到 ！ 可是写字的话我在用我的windows/CE 和一个软件叫CE star / 非常方便的！
excuter
April 13, 2008, 08:29 PMHi scheu, guolanusa there was a thread about usefull tools for learning chinese somewhere ... I don´t find it right now... well, maybe someone else can post you a link... BTW did you guys check out John Pasdens site? Here´s a link to it: http://www.sinosplice.com/ Ps: check out his samples of shanghai hua ^_^
excuter
April 07, 2008, 05:18 PMsounds interesting...but I won´t install it just for that (maybe not so) little fun.