Looking for program to translate 汉字 to pinyin

[jade-]

Hello everyone,

I am looking for a program that automatically translates Chinese characters(汉字） into pinyin. I am not sure if there is a such program, figure that won't hurt to ask. Appreciate if anyone could give me some information on it.

Thanks in advance.

[Guoke]

If you use Microsoft Word, you can add phonetic guides or pinyin to the Chinese characters you have selected:

1. Select the character(s) to which you want to add pinyin.

2. On the Format menu, point to Asian Layout, and then click Phonetic Guide.

Note that this feature is only available if Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese is enabled through Microsoft Office Language Settings.

[yolander]

Try this website "http://www.webmasterhome.cn/tool/Word_Spell.asp" by IE.

[TCcookie]

Oh my goodness, I had no idea that Word feature existed. That's awesome!

Also there's www.mandarintools.com , their Dim Sum program. And Adsotrans, but really this should all be on older threads.

[jade-]

Thanks guys!

Guoke, I agree with TCcookie, I never knew Word has this feature. It is very cool, exactly what I wanted.

yolander, I had a hard time to make the program work, it only kept giving the same characters instead of pinyins, even though it says to translate the character to pinyin. Maybe I have missed something? I did use IE, not Firefox.

TCcookie, your link is good too, even it cannot translate characters to pinyin directly, but it can translate pinyin with numbers to the marked tones, I can live with that.

Thanks again guys, these are really helpful!

[jslee]

Here's an online one but it only allows a few at a time:

http://www.frelax.com/cgi-local/pinyin/hz2py.cgi

or this one:

http://www.primezero.com/terminal/hanzi_to_pinyin

[jade-]

Thanks, jslee. They are very cool, I bookmarked them. The Japanese one is kind of funny to use, but it works as expected, so no complaint.

[LaoZhang]

And on that Word feature, it helps to play with the "off-set" which is the distance between the pinyin and the character and the font size of the pinyin. I have a button on my tool bar for this (go to View/Toolbar/Customize/ and on the Commands tab, choose Format/Phonetic guide).

Also, if you're converting a longer sentences, I've found that I need to insert a space between each character so all of the pinyin shows. Otherwise it gets crowded.

Finally, you can do a coupe of rows of text at a time.

If anyone knows how to avoid having to insert spaces between, please post!

[Hofmann]

There's a program called HanConv. It can convert Chinese to many romanization systems. I don't know if it's still available.

[simonlaing]

here's one that's great

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=annotate

as it gives you the choice of pinyin under it. , pop up or just characters with pinyin and english pop up information.

I have also used the http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/pinyin.html

site, though it is not quite as smooth and you have to do some copy and pasting.

have fun,

Simon:)

[franksmule]

I use http://teachwo.com, I used to use Dimsum but it doesn't work properly on vista.

[davidj]

You need to be a little careful with these tools as most, if not all, don't go beyond using a dictionary of common 汉词 to distinction between different pronunciations and tones for the same character.

[roddy]

Surprised nobody's mentioned Adsotrans - select the Hanzi>Pinyin option. With the size of the dictionary behind it, plus the translation engine, I'd expect it to be a lot smarter at figuring out different pronunciations than anything just based around characters or CEDICT.

[jade-]

Hi, thanks for everyone on this thread to provide all these wonderful tools. I have tried all of them and like them all - I am not a picky user.

Sorry for responding so slowly, for some reason I stopped receiving emails from this forum to tell me more posts having been added on this thread.

LaoZhang, thank you for the tips. I do too, sometimes think it is pretty crowded in Microsoft Word.