Palm CEDICT
INTRODUCTION
Welcome
to Mike's Palm CEDICT page. CEDICT is a publicly available Chinese /
English dictionary compiled by Paul Denisowski. Paul's web page has
disappeared but this
mirror site may still exist. Erik (mandarintools.com) has unofficially
picked up development of the dictionary. His version is here. An entirely different Erik is also actively
working on a revision of CEDICT. His
version may be found here.
I've
reformatted the dictionary so that it is suitable for handheld computers
running PalmOS 3.x. It's important to point out that the dictionary is
just a bunch of data that is not extremely useful all by itself. To
search it you need a nifty shareware package from Hiroshi Kawashima called KDIC.
To display Chinese characters, I use a great shareware product called ChOS by Water Lou. Although the Brando Workshop has several great
Chinese / English dictionaries for KDIC, they didn't meet my requirements
1. GB encoding
2. "toneless" pinyin lookup
3. customizable
4. English-->Chinese capability
So I
decided to write some software to convert CEDICT into PDB format for my Palm
IIIx.
INSTALLATION
To
use the dictionary,
1. Download and install
ChOS 2.51 (GB version). Read the readme.htm file.
2. Download and
install KDIC 1.24. Read the readme-e.txt file.
3. Download
and install the dictionaries (Big5 version is here).
This
assumes you're familiar with zip files and installation of PDB files on your
Palm handheld.
USAGE
The
current version is extremely crude but I find it very usable. To start
from English, tap on the KDIC icon, tap on the circled "J" in the
upper right corner of the screen, select the dictionary called
"ecdict", then enter the English word using Graffiti. For
example, when I enter "Chinese", the Chinese character for
"Han" appears. However, the pronunciation is not given!
To see the pronunciation, just select the Chinese character by tapping and
dragging, then tap on "ABC" to bring up the ChOS keyboard, and then
write "/L". ChOS then tells you how to pronounce the character,
i.e., "han4". By the way, "Han" refers to the ethnic
group by that name. To see the characters for "Chinese
language", you have to enter "Chinese language". Remember
that you can use the Palm's up/down button to scroll through the entries.
Also, you can see a list of close words by tapping on the circled "L"
in the upper right corner of the screen.
Likewise,
to enter a Chinese word using toneless pinyin, launch KDIC, select the
dictionary called "cedict", then use Graffiti to enter the pinyin
without tone numbers and without spaces between syllables. For example,
when I enter "meiguo", the Chinese characters for "MeiGuo"
appear followed by the definition, "America".
WHAT'S
BROKEN
There
are quite a few words in the dictionary which ChOS (GB/simplified small font
database) cannot display. Since these tend to be infrequently used words,
this has not been a problem for me.
In
list mode, KDIC does not display some Chinese characters properly. You
have to click on the item to see the Chinese characters. I will ask
Hiroshi to fix this.
WHAT'S
NEW
Big5 Version 0.3 (March 21, 2002)
|
|
Experimental Big5 version has been added! It comes in a separate zip file. |
Version 0.3 (January 14, 2001)
|
|
Updated to Erik's latest version of CEDICT |
|
|
E->C mapping was improved. Removed the leading "a", "an", "the", and "to" from the English entries (e.g., "to make" becomes "make"). This should make it easier to find many words. |
Version 0.2 (January 1,
2001)
|
|
Fixed some problems with word ordering. |
|
|
Worked around a limitation in KDIC. If you chose a word from KDIC "list" mode and there were other definitions for that word, KDIC would jump to the first occurrence of the word. Now, duplicate words are numbered, e.g., "mei (01)", so they're all unique. |
WARRANTY,
LIABILITY, Etc.
There
is no warranty. I cannot guarantee that this will not melt down your Palm
handheld. It has not melted mine. Use the dictionary at your own
risk. I do not accept responsibility if someone punches you in the nose
because you called them a word you looked up in this dictionary. CEDICT
is copyrighted by Paul Denisowski. I believe that my reformatting the
dictionary does not violate Paul's license agreement. Paul's license
agreement is included with the PDB files.
I
cannot afford to offer support.
FEEDBACK
Feedback
on the Palm version of CEDICT is welcomed. Send to daimaike@yahoo.com. If there are
words that should be added to the dictionary, please let me know. If you
know both the word and the definition, you can always submit them directly to Erik.
If
you like KDIC or have questions about it, please send e-mail to Hiroshi.
Likewise, if you enjoy seeing those Chinese fonts display on your handheld or
if you have questions on ChOS, please send e-mail to Water.
Please
send me e-mail if you download the dictionary files. That way I can let
you know when there is an update.
Also, when someone
with more spare time than me inevitably produces a better version, please let
me know.