posted by Xiao Hu on December 20, 2010 | 4 comments
I think this is the most complete Chinese to English convertor, and

"http://popupchinese.com/chinese/adso">Chinese to Pinyin convertor tool
and Pinyin Tone Mark annotator toolI've ever seen. You can convert chinese characters to pinyin, add tone marks to pinyin for easier reading and add it to the body of your messages, and annotate chinese text to boot! For every Chinese student, this is a must, and I had no idea this existed before today. Maybe it would help if the link were more obvious, it might help us understand what Adsotrans is supposed to be. "Adsotrans" though, is a very cool name!
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Echo on December 21, 2010 | reply
@Xiao Hu,

嘿嘿,你刚发现啊 :P

谢谢支持!

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com
Xiao Hu on December 22, 2010 | reply
@Echo,

对啊!我刚发现了。我以前不知道"ADSOTRANS" 是什么玩意儿,所以从来没点击那个链接,我是戴维告诉我们ADSOTRANS是什么才知道的。笨小虎,唉!
trevelyan on December 22, 2010 | reply
@Xiao Hu,

Thanks for the support and the SEO help! Adsotrans goes back a long way, which is why the name doesn't map well to what it does. It's a bit of a strange beast.

We try to break the text down to fundamentals and then slowly build up units of meaning. If you look at the annotated text carefully, you'll see that the system is trying to sort out what is a verb, noun, adjective, etc. and build up the texts into meaningful chunks based on grammatical context. It ends up being surprisingly good, although there are occasionally problems (my vote for the most irritating is seeing 还 keep getting pegged as "huan2"). If you end up using it heavily, remember that you can highlight words you see missing and they'll enter our review queue. Adding stuff over time really pushes up the quality. We release the dictionary publicly, so the entries also flow out to places like Plecodict where people can download the dictionary for free.

I think we'll have to revisit the header menu in a future iteration of the site fwiw. Right now I like the aesthetic, but the mouseover can make navigation a bit rough for first-time users. And we might be getting on Google's bad side because the code involves hidden text.

Cheers,

--dave

Xiao Hu on December 24, 2010 | reply
@Trevelyan,

Anything I can do to help. I'd love for Popupchinese to become the dominant website of its kind. Anyway, every little bit counts for something.

Overall the Pinyin converter tool is very accurate, with only minor glitches when it comes to 多音字,it sometimes chooses the wrong reading or wrong tone.

Overall it's excellent, over 95 % accuracy.

I think eveyone should try and contribute just a little to the dictionary, send in a definition, collocation or set phrase and I think it will grow exponentially.