Microsoft's experimental English-Chinese dictionary mines the web for data (video)

When it comes to quick and dirty machine translation it may not supplant Google Translate anytime soon, but for those who would actually learn another language, Microsoft's working on some fairly impressive tools. Engkoo is an search engine for Chinese speakers that scours the web for its data, finding articles that are written in both Chinese and English to create an continually-updated lexicon, plus provide interactive (and audible) sample sentences that explain nuances of the language. See a rundown (in English) of what's possible so far in a Silverlight video after the break, and try it out for yourself at our source link -- if you must, you can even search for "tiananmen."

[Joseph9307 Posted Aug 4th 2010 4:58PM]

Ni hao ma.

:/

[eggimage Posted Aug 4th 2010 7:09PM]

@Joseph9307
simplified chinese only? again?

[SophT Posted Aug 4th 2010 7:36PM]

@eggimage because everyone that speaks Cantonese already speaks English. It's a gross generalization I know- but it's far more true than can be said for Mandarin speakers.

[sseries Posted Aug 4th 2010 10:14PM]

@SophT

There is so much wrong with that statement it's untrue!! Traditional characters are not just used in HK and Macau, Cantonese is not just spoken in Hong Kong, not even all people in HK can speak English let alone all Cantonese speakers. And don't even get me started in the implication in your post that if you don't speak Cantonese, you speak Mandarin Chinese!! As if there are only the two languages in China!!

Some basic knowledge about what you are posting about is useful.

[midnightblade Posted Aug 4th 2010 10:42PM]

@SophT

Yea definitely not true. Maybe if you've ONLY been to Hong Kong and ONLY been on the Hong Kong island side of Hong Kong then yea, you might get that impression. But there's a reason why Cantonese is called Guang Dong Hua in Mandarin, not Xiang Gang Hua.

[d0mth0ma5 Posted Aug 4th 2010 4:59PM]

Microsoft have really been paying attention to the Sentence of the Day recently.

[That guy 2 Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:01PM]

Cool? I feel like being downranked so: First!

[That guy 2 Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:06PM]

@That guy 2 Can someone please just downrank me? Please? Whatever I'm leaving

[samisax Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:10PM]

@That guy 2

I'm upranking you.

[uckApple Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:11PM]

@That guy 2

I Lol'd @ fail.

[That guy 2 Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:13PM]

@samisax Shit, I knew you guys would do that haha, I don't care though, I guess I'll prank myself now...

[hmmwv Posted Aug 5th 2010 10:40AM]

@That guy 2 There you go:

酷吗？ 我感觉自己像这样被 downranked： 第一 ！

[crow610 Posted Aug 7th 2010 3:03AM]

@hmmwv 靠

[psa Posted Aug 4th 2010 5:40PM]

OH HAI GUISE!
CAN SOMEONE POINT ME TO GOOGLE TRANSLATE.
kthx.

[ewlung Posted Aug 4th 2010 6:03PM]

What I want is this:

- Use mobile phone camera to get "chinese text" from book or newspaper.

- Click to translate that to english (or other language).

Nothing in the market yet, not even Goggle !

[Weber 09 Posted Aug 4th 2010 6:36PM]

@ewlung google goggles? I think that may do what your looking for.

On a different note, if searches such as tienanmen are not filtered, then this entire lexicon is most likely unavailable directly in china thanks to the great firewall.

Yay communism!
/sarc

[techdaemon Posted Aug 4th 2010 8:58PM]

@Weber 09 The word Tiananmen isn't banned in China they just enforce filtering on what associations it brings up. So as long as their example sentence isn't "The guy standing in front of the tank during the 1989 Tiananmen riot was super brave" it's not gonna be banned. Tiananmen is a pretty popular spot for people to go to in Beijing (I guess like a plantless central park of sorts for Beijing) so people probably search for it all the time in China.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 5th 2010 11:54AM]

i wish there was something like this for mandarin learners :(