Translation tools

stoicjustice
 March 15, 2010, 11:05 PM posted in I Have a Question

What is the best program to use for finding out the pinyin/english translation of a written sentence in character form?  I used to have a program called WenLin but I can't seem to find it and I am also now a Mac user and don't think it is compatible.  I basically just want a program or website where when I draw my mouse over the characters, it gives me the pinyin and/or english translation of the phrase.  (Kind of like Cpod does for their lesson content.)  I want this so that it can help me to translate those things that I read in the Community sections of Cpod.  thanks for any help

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hamshank
 March 16, 2010, 03:14 AM

https://addons.mozilla.org/zh-TW/firefox/addon/3343

A good add-on for firefox.

Its a popup translator.

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xiao_liang

Definitely the best one. Not yet available in Chrome, alas.

Otherwise, Google Translate does it for you. If you enter a chinese phrase, and set it as "translate english to chinese", you can click the little + and it will show you the pinyin. Then you can switch the translation to see the english.

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xiao_liang
 March 16, 2010, 09:03 AM

Definitely the best one. Not yet available in Chrome, alas.

Otherwise, Google Translate does it for you. If you enter a chinese phrase, and set it as "translate english to chinese", you can click the little + and it will show you the pinyin. Then you can switch the translation to see the english.

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xiao_liang
 March 16, 2010, 09:13 AM

ARGH. Replies still not appearing!!

Aaanyway. As I was saying, that plug-in is brilliant, but sadly only in firefox. If you're using chrome or another browser, google translate can do it for you. If you put in the chinese characters, and set it to translate English to Chinese, you can click the little + and it will show you the pinyin. Then you can switch the language direction, and it will show you the english translation

 

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xiao_liang
 March 16, 2010, 03:46 PM

Oh, and by a weird coincidence, I've just been sent this:

http://mandarin.about.com/od/reviews/fr/web_page_annotator.htm

No idea if it's any good, but it's a free java application that puts inline translation and pinyin onto chinese language websites.

 

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stoicjustice
 March 16, 2010, 05:18 PM

Thanks for the help, I'm setting up the firefox add-on ASAP.