@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