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Get translation and pinyin when highlighting chinese words?

DaXia   May 5th, 2012 7:03a.m.

Yo!

Im using a great app on my android called pleco, that pops up an english translation and pinyin for any chinese word I highlight. I was wondering if there were any software like that for PC that someone could recommend?
Preferably ChineseChinese (explanation in Chinese), but ChineseEnglish would of course work as well.

What I want is to have this program running in the background, and whenever I highlight a Chinese word while surfing the net etc, an explanation with pinyin would pop up.

Any recommendations?

Thanks!

icebear   May 5th, 2012 7:18a.m.

ZhongWen popup for Chrome does it, although only within Chrome.

mcfarljw   May 5th, 2012 7:36a.m.

I'll post the same thing I posted on your other post praising Pleco and add another. These are both system wide, not browser specific. Meaning you can use them in text files and other applications with highlight-able text.

http://cidian.youdao.com/

http://cidian.dict.cn/

DaXia   May 5th, 2012 9:36a.m.

Thanks guys. http://cidian.youdao.com/ did not work for me, program stopped responding when highlighting words. The other works fine though. There is however one thing about it that bothers me, and that is that it does not show pinyin for anything else than "set words". For example, it shows pinyin for 国防 but not 国防部. For the later it only shows translation. Kind of irritating, but it will do until I find something better.

mcfarljw   May 5th, 2012 10:12a.m.

@DaXia, You're right, actually the program is made for Chinese people. So it includes random pinyin and uncommon ones that wouldn't be trivial. I find the dictionary translations better than those CC-CEDICT project http://cc-cedict.org/wiki/start which is one of the dictionaries Pleco uses.

DaXia   May 5th, 2012 12:15p.m.

I just tried a program called Pablo, and OMFG does it PISS ME OFF.
Its free, and thats great but it's like its made to be as annoying as possible.
The popups does not work. I tried to search for an answer to why that is, without any luck. And then I found an .exe file in the directory pablo was installed (yeah, pablo does not create any shortcuts etc). It was called pablo_options.exe (the options are obviously not accessible from the pablo program itself...wtf). In the options program I found a tab called popups, and I thought BINGO. Apparently you have to turn on the popups from inside the options program (there is no mention of this in the tutorial), and then you have to fill in what programs you want it to work in. So I wrote opera.exe firefox.exe etc....but here is the kicker...There is no "save options" button. I thought, cool, it autosaves when I close it....umm...so I closed it and nothing happened...reopened it and found that no changes were saved...


So, in conclusion...PABLO sucks. Dont try it, because it will ruin your day.

范博涵   May 5th, 2012 4:15p.m.

DaXia, the options show up when you click the brown triangle at the top left in the program. It will read the content of options.txt in the Pablo data directory and will allow you to edit it. Changes are saved automatically when you close the options window (at least when opened from within the program).
Pleco works fine in Internet Explorer and QQ, but for alternate browsers you have to use the alternate method, which is highlighting the text and hitting F10. For some reason, only Firefox is listed in the "using alternate method" column. And the latest version of Chrome becomes horribly unstable and even crashes at some point when I open Pablo.
I never had any problems with the old version of Pablo, mind you.

Grahameh   May 7th, 2012 1:59a.m.

Mandarin Pop-up and Zhong Wen add-ons work in Firefox. I prefer the former, but you can 'add' them and switch off whichever you don't want.
I would like to know how Pleco pops up a translation on a web page as I haven't been able to get it to do it on my Android tablet. It is something I have been missing compared with the fantastic Mandarin Pop-up on my notebook.

icebear   May 7th, 2012 3:07a.m.

Pleco allows web browsing, and once on a page you can click a clipboard icon which copies all the text into the standard document reader.

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