October 14, 2011

Please note: This only affects the translation of text from Chinese to English and vice versa. The functionality to look up individual words or the dictionary definitions of any Chinese word in a text remains unchanged!

The translation page of this website uses (now and before) Google Translate to perform text translation. Google recently changed their previously freely available website integration APIs to a paid service. This has forced us to change the way translation results are presented.

Translations from Chinese to English function much the same as they did before. First the translated text from Google is shown, scroll down to find the MDBG dictionary definitions for each individual word.

Translations from English to Chinese now only show the translated text from Google. To get the MDBG dictionary definitions for each individual word, copy / paste the translated text from Google to the text input field below the translated text and press the "Go" button. In effect, the same functionality is offered as before. We understand however that this is slightly less convenient than the way it was presented before. With Google's new policies this is the best we can offer at this moment (as a free service).

New features: in the Google Translate section:

• click on translated words to choose alternative translations
• hold down the shift key, click, and drag the words to reorder
• click the [Ä] button to get a pīnyīn transliteration of the entire (translated) Chinese text
• click the speaker icon to hear the pronunciation of the entire (translated) Chinese text (only seems to be available for short texts)

You might need to scroll the Google Translate section down a bit when translating long texts.

Update (2011-11-04): translations on mobile devices such as Android and Apple IOS now show the mobile version of Google translate.