Cantonese dictionary for palm OS?

[Southernjohn]

I just got my new Treo 650.. very happy with it. I am installing plecodict, of course (the reason I bought a pda to begin with). I am wondering if anyone knows of a Cantonese-Eng, Eng-Cantonese dictionary out there? I have googled, but have had no luck so far. I only found a travel phrase book. Not very useful.

thanks for the help,

Southerjohn

[Ncao]

Is there really such a thing as a Catonese-English dictionary ? Cantonese isn't really considered as a language.

[flameproof]

Cantonese isn't really considered as a language.

First time I hear that.

Check Ectaco, here is a PPC one, not sure about PALM...

http://www.ectaco.com/LingvoSoft-Suite-English-Chinese-Cantonese-Traditional-for-Pocket-PC/

[mikelove]

There are a couple of Cantonese dictionaries out there, but at least from the inquiries we've made they're all tied up in exclusive licenses with companies that make standalone electronic dictionaries, so it's doubtful that we at Pleco or anybody else will come out with one for Palm anytime soon.

This Ectaco product looks like a Cantonese phrasebook bundled with a traditional-character Chinese dictionary (which doesn't appear to give pronunciation guides in Cantonese but only in Mandarin) - these should be easy to find, we used to offer a Cantonese phrasebook too until we let the license expire due to profoundly terrible sales, but an actual dictionary might be harder.

With a Treo, though, you might have some success using CantoDict in a web browser - I haven't actually tried it on my Treo yet, but the design seems simple enough that it would have a good chance of working.

[flameproof]

so it's doubtful that we at Pleco.........

Isn't PlecoDict not just a interface to whatever dictionary DB that fit's it format?

So basically it will be the same as one of the current Dicts, with the only different that the former Pinyin is now Yale.

So if http://www.cantodict.org has a downloadable DB I am sure you can bring it into a required format as a privat user. Of course, Pleco, as a commercial company may can not just D/L and sell it.... For them it's a bit more complicated.

I guess you could use this fully featured dictionary:

http://www.chineselanguage.org/dictionaries/ccdict/support/readme.txt

Entries are are tab separated and it should be very easy to delete all the stuff you don't need and Pleco can't handly.

[mikelove]

Actually at the moment our search engine is somewhat specifically keyed to Pinyin, so we'd need to do some coding work to add support for Yale Cantonese - if you stuck a Cantonese database into our database converter the character search would probably work but romanization search would be iffy at best.

Licensing Cantodict is not possible, I'm afraid (we checked). I don't think they offer a raw database download either, so you'd probably have to set up some sort of script to extract data from their web page, and regardless it would likely be illegal to distribute the resulting database without their permission.

The other dictionary you link to appears to be single character only (similar to Unihan, which we already offer on our website with Cantonese romanizations intact) so I don't know how useful it would be as a general-purpose language reference.

[wannabeafreak]

Actually at the moment our search engine is somewhat specifically keyed to Pinyin, so we'd need to do some coding work to add support for Yale Cantonese - if you stuck a Cantonese database into our database converter the character search would probably work but romanization search would be iffy at best.

Forget Yale. I'd pay top dollar for Jyutping version.