We've recently released an updated version of our downloadable Chinese annotation software. Our thanks to all of you who have helped push this release forward by making edits and additions through our online Chinese-English dictionary.

If you are already a user of our Firefox Chinese dictionary plugin you can upgrade to the latest release by reinstalling it here. And if you aren't using it... why not? Don't you want easy tooltip popups with pinyin and english definitions whenever you mouseover Chinese words on any webpage? And what about the convenience of our power hotkeys: "A" fires words to your Popup Chinese vocabulary list, "D" switches between simplified and traditional characters and "G" fetches the Google translation of any highlighted passage? Then there's that whole click-to-edit thing that lets you customize the dictionary.

We hope you find these materials useful and encourage you to take part in our editing community. Questions and feedback are always welcome at service@popupchinese.com, while software developers are encourged to check out the raw database and source code distribution by visiting our software downloads page.
orbital
 said on
June 28, 2009
Updated, thanks. That Google translate hot-key is an absolute winner, by the way. Incredibly useful for translation work. I stumbled into it by accident and then spent the next five minutes trying to figure out exactly how it had happened so I could do it again.

Maybe you could put up a clearer explanation of how to use it on the downloads page. A rotating flash banner or something instead of the static graphic.
mat
 said on
June 28, 2009
Okay, it's great but...

1. Pops up are appearing over themselves.

2. Common words have either no definition or alternate definitions which aren't appropriate like 说 for example.

3. I need to keep toggling it so it starts working again.

I really really need something like this, it's a great thing so thanks for making it. However I need it so much I'd very happily buy a commercial product that did this kind of thing.

Something with a licensed dictionary for a start... does anything like that exist?
Announcements
 said on
June 28, 2009
@mat - Looks like you've found an error in the code we're using to convert the dictionary into the plugin format. May be an indexing problem. I'll take a look and see if we can get the problem solved since we obviously need to dominant definition there, and it is clearly in the dictionary.

The popups that get toggled on are independent of the webpage, so you'll get double popups if you turn on the plugin and then look at the transcripts on Popup Chinese. Suggest toggling it off for our own site, if only because the definitions are contextual and more focused than you'll get with the plugin.

Will update here otherwise when I've got some news on the issues you've reported.

--dave
Announcements
 said on
June 28, 2009
@mat - the problem with 说 in your plugin should be fixed if you reinstall - the index files were not fully updated so the plugin was pulling the definition for a slightly different word.

I'll look into the problem with the popups turning on and off. It would help if you could send me your version number of Firefox and the page on which you're having the problem.

In the meantime - while you'll always need to use your mouse to toggle the plugin on the first time you want to use it - you can press Ctrl+Shift+A to toggle the popups on and off after that. This makes it pretty easy to switch the plugin on and off depending on which site you're reading. You should go with our contextual popups anywhere on Popup Chinese since they are manually annotated.

Just to touch on your final point, the Adso dictionary goes back almost a decade at this point, and is actually much larger than most commercial dictionaries at this point with a total of about 200,000 entries. While there are always problems, we fix issues as they are reported so if you notice problems with the data or missing entries, please either write us or edit them using the click-to-edit dictionary interface.

Best,

--dave
mat
 said on
June 28, 2009
Right, double pop-ups makes perfect sense. No worries about turning it on the first time, it's just having to toggle off and then on again to get it to work was a bit of a pain.

I'll keep an eye out for the on/off thing. My Firefox is 3.0.11. I think the web pages were here (comments threads) and probably gmail.

Regarding dictionary. It's not really a vocb issue, it's an issue of definitions. That said, for a pop-up very simple defintions obviously work - it had just been my experience that there were loads of bust words. Since that looks to have been a seperate issue happy to suck it and see ;)
orbital
 said on
June 29, 2009
Updated again. Noticed a couple of strange definitions before too.

mat
 said on
June 29, 2009
Okay good news is 说 is fixed, bad news is the toggle thing hit me hard on this page. Had to toggle it repeatedly before it worked.
mat
 said on
June 29, 2009
Incidentally, for want of a better place to post this... what IME do folks favor?

I quite like the regular MS new experience one, at least it sets the benchmark. I like the bigger font on Google's IME (particularly at home when I'm using a projector), but the way it works is a bit weird. Also tried some customisable very popular one (in China apparently) which looked great but I needed to tweak settings and the entire thing was in Chinese.

Actually... I figured it was time I learned computer terms so I could read this sort of stuff so I switched my Windows 7 install to Chinese. Something of a crash course ;-)

(buggers insist you have to buy Ultimate to be able to switch OS languages when it comes out)
mat
 said on
June 29, 2009
Another bug. Occasionally it switches back to traditional. I press D and it says then traditional but I get simplified.

Which is fine but it seems it's around the wrong way.
trevelyan
 said on
June 29, 2009
thanks mat, will get that fixed.
Brendan
 said on
June 29, 2009
Hey mat --

I'm a Mac user, so my IME of choice is QIM (which uses the Sogou phrase data set, though unlike the Sogou and Google IMEs it's shareware), but for Windows, I think Google and Sogou are just about equally good. I slightly prefer Google's IME, as it allows users to sync their user phrase data across Google accounts, but given that neither company has introduced a Mac version of its IME, I am probably not all that qualified to judge between them. Maybe someone else can chime in.
mat
 said on
June 30, 2009
I could understand a few options on the Google IME but I think I've done something silly which requires me to hit a number to select rather than just hitting return on the default choice.

I had absolutely no idea that the Google IME synced on Google accounts. That is indeed a killer feature! (Since I use four computers regularly)

Okay well, I'll reinstall and work through the settings with a dictionary and see how I get on this time. I guess Google account details will be buried in the settings

Thanks for that.
Announcements
 said on
January 26, 2010
As is perhaps of interest to some, we're just released an updated version of the Adso NLP toolkit for Chinese natural language processing. This is the software that powers our Chinese to English and Pinyin converter. It is a command-line software application of use mostly to programmers.

If you've made (sensible) edits to our Chinese English online dictionary you should see them go live with our latest version as well. If you've made an edit which hasn't been included for some reason please contact us and we'll figure things out. Part of the changes we made over the weekend involved updating our backend scripts to speed up the process of updating the dictionary: we should be pushing out changes more frequently in the future. I am hoping to get our release cycle down to a weekly basis.

In the meantime, if you've not already installed our Popup Chinese Dictionary Plugin, there is now a bigger and better version waiting for you: download it for free from our site. Subscribers should please remember to install their plugin as a logged-in user in order to automatically get the extra features like integration with on-site vocab lists, etc..
Mark Lesson Studied