ترجمة الالكترونية المحمولة مراجعات

 – Electronic Dictionaries for Chinese, English, الألمانية, etc.

Rationale:

In 11 نوفمبر 2005 I bought the Besta 8600 in هونج كونج to help me learn both المندرينية (Putonghua) and الكانتونية. I wanted a translator that could speak both الكانتونية and المندرينية, had a romanization input method for both, and handwriting recognition for both. I used it for 2 years, found a few bugs, and made a list of suggested improvements which I sent to the company.

In 3 مارس 2008 I bought the Besta T-8000 in mainland الصين to replace my broken Besta 8600. I’d dropped my 8600 so many times that the join between the screen and keyboard had broken. In my search to buy a new translator, I looked at 30+ different models from 10+ different companies in both هونج كونج and mainland الصين before finally choosing the T-8000 as the best fit for my criteria. This device can also be used to translate between any of the following 10 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, الألمانية, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.

In 7 يوليو 2010 I reviewed some newer Besta models (Super5000 and Super9988) for a friend.

Reviews are presented below in reverse chronological order.

If you want me to test your company’s translator, contact me by clicking the link.

If you want to buy a Besta translator, click the link or the image below.

Markets:

Most Chinese-English translation devices on sale in هونج كونج, ماكاو, and تايوان are designed for people from those places to learn English or Taiwanese Mandarin, but often they can also be used by English speakers to learn Taiwanese Mandarin.

Most Chinese-English translation devices on sale in mainland الصين are designed for people from mainland الصين to learn English, but often they can also be used by English speakers to learn mainland المندرينية (Putonghua).

Terminology:

The words traditional, complex, and full-form refer to those Chinese characters in use in تايوان, هونج كونج, and ماكاو. These are called 繁体/繁體 in Chinese.

The words simplified, and simple refer to those Chinese characters in use in mainland الصين. Their traditional written forms have been modified (or simplified) to make them easier to write. These are called 简体/簡體 in Chinese.

Besta Super 9988 / 好易通 牛津全能王 Super9988 (Reviewed 7 يوليو 2010 in الصين)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator a score of 4 out of 5.
• This translator is similar to the T-8000 (below), except for the following major differences ...
  • The Super9988 is a newer model.
  • The Super9988 CPU is much faster than the T-8000.
  • The Super9988 (like the Super5000 below) has a function which allows you to zoom Chinese characters or English words to make them easier to see. This function is very useful for quickly seeing the fine details of a Chinese character that has many strokes.
  • The Super9988 screen is large. The viewable image is 94mm wide, 53mm high, roughly 4.3 inches diagonally.
  • The Super9988 is physically larger than the T-8000.
  • The digit buttons (i.e. 0 to 9) are too small and thus difficult to press.
  • The stylus is stored in the left-hand side of the device which is quite annoying for the 90% of the population who are right-handed.
  • Dimensions: 140mm x 87mm x 19mm.
• For a foreigner learning Chinese, the biggest drawback is:
  • You cannot do a multi-pinyin search. (If you want to do a toneless pinyin search on Besta, see more details on my Besta toneless pinyin search page.)

Besta Super 5000 / 好易通 牛津全能王 Super5000 (Reviewed 7 يوليو 2010 in الصين)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator a score of 4½ out of 5.
• This translator is almost identical to the T-8000 (below), except for the following major differences ...
  • The Super5000 is a newer model.
  • The Super5000 CPU is much faster than the T-8000.
  • The Super5000 has a function which allows you to zoom Chinese characters or English words to make them easier to see. This function is very useful for quickly seeing the fine details of a Chinese character that has many strokes.
• For a foreigner learning Chinese, the biggest drawback is:
  • You cannot do a multi-pinyin search. (If you want to search using multiple pinyin on your Besta, click the link to see more details.)

Besta T-8000 / 好易通 全球翻译王 T-8000 (Purchased 3 مارس 2008 in الصين)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator a score of 4 out of 5.
• This translator is designed for mainland Chinese people to learn English, but can also be used by speakers of English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, الألمانية, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian to learn any of the other 9 languages.
• The UI (user interface) can run in English, المندرينية Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
• It has handwriting recognition of both full-form and simplified-form Chinese characters. It comes with a built-in stylus.
• It has handwriting recognition of some الكانتونية-specific Chinese characters, but most do not have any corresponding dictionary entries.
• You can also enter Chinese characters using المندرينية pinyin (with or without the tone), and various other radical-based methods, but it does not have a الكانتونية romanization input method.
• You cannot do a multi-pinyin search. (If you want to do a toneless pinyin search on Besta, see more details on my Besta toneless pinyin search page.)
• It has sentence translation (Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese). Of course, the translation is often inaccurate, but it’s also often good enough to get the message across.
• It has tens of thousands of built-in sentence pairs (English and Chinese) which can be searched using either language. These are often more useful than the sentence translation functionality, and they’re also very useful for learning how to use new words.
• It can pronounce Chinese characters in both المندرينية and الكانتونية.
• You can use it to learn to write Chinese, since it gives you the stroke order for most Chinese characters in both full and simplified forms.
• Contains the following dictionaries:
  • English-to-English-and-Chinese (Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, Sixth Edition / 牛津 高阶英汉双解词典 第六版),
  • English-to-Chinese,
  • Chinese-to-English,
  • Chinese-to-Chinese (现代汉语词典 修订本),
  • 160 specialist and technical dictionaries (e.g. Anatomy, Botany, Chemistry, Computers, Films, Physics, Zoology, etc.),
  • Ten-language dictionary in which you can search for a word in any of the 10 languages, and see the corresponding word(s) in the other 9 languages. It can also pronounce the words in all 10 languages. The languages are: English, Chinese (mainland المندرينية), Japanese, Korean, الألمانية, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.
  • Cambridge Encyclopedia (English-to-Chinese).
  • Japanese-to-Chinese, and Chinese-to-Japanese.
  • Korean-to-Chinese.
  • Russian-to-Chinese.
  • French-to-Chinese.
  • German-to-Chinese.
  • Spanish-to-Chinese.
• Has a multi-language collection of dialogues covering many everyday situations. The languages covered are: Mandarin, English, Japanese, Cantonese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Malay, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Sichuanese, Hakka, and Taiwanese.
• Has PDA-like functions such as: Alarm Clock, Calculator, Calendar, Games (e.g. Chinese Chess), MP3 Player, World Time Clock, etc.
• Has a colour screen with a backlight. The viewable image is 70mm wide, 53mm high, roughly 3½ inches diagonally.
• Has a yucky-feeling QWERTY keyboard (217mm wide) with no backlight.
• Screen text is resizable – 2 sizes: small, and normal.
• Has 1 SD Memory Card slot. (You can store dictionaries, documents, music, pictures, etc. on such cards.)
• Runs on a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery.
• One year warranty.
• The CPU is a bit slow – much slower than my old Besta 8600 model.
• Dimensions: 125mm x 87mm x 19mm.
• Overall, it’s an excellent translator compared to other models (e.g. Besta T-9000, Besta CD-900, Casio EW-V3600L, Casio EW-V2800H, Instant Dict MD9288, Instant Dict 8980, 快译通 牛津9388, etc.) that I’ve played with in shops but it’s not perfect. It could be easily improved by making the modifications I suggest below.

Bugs:

1. The device has some physical design flaws:
   • The On-Off button is too tall. It sometimes gets pushed when you close the screen. (On my translator, I filed the button down!)
   • The rear protruding plastic legs that balance the device on a table stick out so much as to damage the provided material cover (or any other bag you happen to be carrying it in). (On my translator, I cut them off!)
   • The device turns on when you recharge it. This slows the recharging process, and makes no sense. (I manually turn my translator off as soon as I plug in the recharger.)
2. Some of the bugs listed below in my Besta 8600 review are still present in this device. Some have been fixed though.

Suggested Improvements:

1. Most of the suggested improvements in my Besta 8600 review below still apply to this device.
   

Besta T-9000 / 好易通T-9000 (Reviewed 3 مارس 2008 in الصين)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator a score of 3½ out of 5 (if you want it to learn Simplified Chinese).
• This translator is almost identical to the T-8000 (above), except for the following major differences ...
  • The T-9000 is dearer than the T-8000.
  • The T-9000 CPU is much faster than the T-8000.
  • Both the device and screen are larger than the T-8000.
  • The T-9000 is not able to display traditional characters, whereas the T-8000 is. If you hand-write a traditional character, then it is recognized and displayed as the simplified character. If you’re not an expert in simplified characters then you may not know if the character was recognized correctly or not.
  • The T-9000 does not recognize الكانتونية-specific characters, whereas the T-8000 does.
• For a foreigner learning Chinese, the biggest drawback is:
  • You cannot do a multi-pinyin search. (If you want to do a toneless pinyin search on Besta, see more details on my Besta multi-pinyin search page.)

Besta 8600 / 好易通8600 (Purchased 11 نوفمبر 2005 in هونج كونج)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator a score of 3½ out of 5.
• This translator is designed for هونج كونج, ماكاو, and Taiwanese Chinese people to learn English, but can also be used by speakers of English to learn Taiwanese Chinese (and to a lesser degree, to learn mainland المندرينية Chinese).
• It has handwriting recognition of both full-form and simplified-form Chinese characters. It comes with a built-in stylus.
• It has handwriting recognition of many الكانتونية-specific Chinese characters.
• You can also enter Chinese characters (one at a time) using المندرينية pinyin (but you must also enter the tone), الكانتونية romanization (without the tone), and various other radical-based methods.
• You cannot do a multi-pinyin search. (If you want to search using toneless pinyin on your Besta, click the link to see more details.)
• It has sentence translation (Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese). Of course, the translation is often inaccurate, but it’s also often good enough to get the message across.
• It has tens of thousands of built-in sentence pairs (English and Chinese) which can be searched using either language. These are often more useful than the sentence translation functionality, and they’re also very useful for learning how to use new words.
• It can pronounce Chinese characters in both المندرينية and الكانتونية.
• You can use it to learn to write full-form Chinese, since it gives you the stroke order for most Chinese characters (in full form only).
• Contains 2 English-to-Chinese dictionaries, 1 Chinese to English dictionary, and 1 Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary, plus you can download for free (from the Besta HK website) over 100 specialist and technical dictionaries.
• Has PDA-like functions such as: Alarm Clock, Calculator, Calendar, Games, MP3 Player, Photo Album, World Time Clock, etc.
• Has a colour screen with a backlight. The viewable image is roughly 77mm wide, 56mm high.
• Has a nice-feeling QWERTY keyboard (228mm wide) with no backlight.
• Screen text is resizable – 3 sizes: small, normal, and large.
• Has 2 SD Memory Card slots. (You can store dictionaries, documents, music, pictures, etc. on such cards.)
• Runs on a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery.
• One year warranty.
• Overall, it’s a very good translator compared with other models I’ve played with in shops but it’s not perfect. It could be easily improved by making the modifications I suggest below.

Bugs:

1. Go to Sentence Translation, enter the simplified form of guang3 (广) by either Chinese Handwriting or Chinese Pinyin, then press Enter. The word is translated as ‘wide’ (which is ok) but press the المندرينية speaking button and it gets pronounced as ‘yan’ instead of ‘guang’!
   
   
2. The المندرينية pronunciation of ‘ting’ and ‘qing’ sound almost identical! The pronunciation should be improved.
   
   
3. Type the two characters ‘ting1qing1’ (听清) in المندرينية or Taiwanese mode. Pronounce it in المندرينية and it incorrectly pronounces the first character as ‘yan’!
   
   
4. Type ‘re4qi4qiu2’ in full form (熱氣球) and it successfully finds the English translation ‘hot-air balloon’ in the CBE, but type ‘re4qi4qiu2’ in simplified form (热气球) and it finds nothing!
   
   
5. The الكانتونية pronunciation of ‘sam’ (心, 深, etc.) is horrible. It currently sounds like ‘song’.
   
   
6. The الكانتونية pronunciation of ‘si’ (屎) is wrong. It currently sounds like ‘fei’ but it should be ‘si’ just like 史.
   
   
7. The الكانتونية pronunciation of ‘geng’ (鏡 and 頸) is wrong. It currently sounds exactly the same as ‘gang’ (亙 or 哽).
   
   
8. The الكانتونية pronunciation of 覺¹ is wrong. It should be ‘gaau’ (sleep), not ‘gok’ (feeling).
   
   
9. The الكانتونية pronunciation of the 2nd character of 按摩 (massage), in the English entry for ‘massage’, is in the wrong tone.
   
   
10. The الكانتونية pronunciation of the 2nd character of 風扇 (fan), in the Chinese dictionary, is in the wrong tone.
    
    
11. The character 當 does not appear in the selection list when ‘dong’ is typed into the الكانتونية input method.
    
    
12. The character 隨 does not appear in the selection list when ‘chui’ is typed into the الكانتونية input method.
    
    
13. The character 蘿 does not appear in the selection list when ‘loh’ is typed into the الكانتونية input method.
    
    
14. When the machine is put into Simplified Character mode, the character 机 (and also 機) does not appear in the selection list when ‘ji1’ is typed into the Chinese Pinyin input method. It (and also 機) does appear when the machine is in Full-form Character mode though!
    
    
15. The English word ‘usually’ is sometimes incorrectly spelt ‘usaually’ in the English-to-English-and-Chinese Oxford Dictionary entries. Have a look at the entry for ‘aboriginal’ for example.
    
    
16. The English word ‘LGP’ should say ‘LPG’ in the Cambridge dictionary entry for 液化石油气.

Suggested Improvements:

1. Some unusual characters are recognized by the entry methods, but have no pronunciation and/or no dictionary entries.
   
   
2. Can you put the الكانتونية romanization on the screen in the dictionary entries just like you do for المندرينية? (See the Sidney Lau HK Government learning الكانتونية books for the best الكانتونية romanization.)
   
   
3. After Chinese characters are entered into the Chinese-English Dictionary lookup, and Enter is pressed, can you change the 8600 to automatically select them so that the user can simply press F2CHN to see the Chinese dictionary for the same Characters?
   
   
4. When entering الكانتونية pinyin, it is not necessary to type the tone before seeing the possible matching Chinese characters. This is very good! Can you do the same thing for the Chinese Pinyin entry method? i.e. Can you make the 8600 show all the matching Chinese words before the user enters the tone mark for the pinyin? (The reason is that people who don’t know المندرينية very well often can’t tell what tone is being said so they don’t know which tone to enter when searching.)
   
   
5. It is possible to search the dictionaries using multiple Chinese characters, for example searching on ‘火车’ gives the dictionary entry for ‘train’, but it’s not possible to search for multiple pinyin’s. For example, it should be possible to search as follows: Searching on ‘gan3 dang’ in المندرينية should give ‘gan dang’. Searching on ‘huo 车’ in المندرينية should give ‘huo che’. Searching on ‘chi sin’ in الكانتونية should give both ‘chi1 sin3’ (crazy) and ‘chi4 sin6’ (charity).
   
   
6. The Chinese dictionary entries should show the classifiers for each noun. e.g. The character 辆 should be listed against 车.

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