Electronic Dictioanary And Computer Software

[dsfbrit]

I have been trying to find a decent electronic dictionary / translator - English/Thai/English.

This would be to replace the dictionary I carry around with me - which is great, but has only 5000 words.

I have tried several and they are pretty useless in my opinion.

Why? - well they just have words.

I know this may sound a stupid thing to say - but in my opinion a word translated is pretty useless without the context its used in. A good example being the thread on greedy.

I would like to buy something that has both words and words in context and even a proper sentence translator.

Oh and price does not seem to make much difference - I recently tried one that cost 15000 baht - no good at all.

But I dont reall want sound unless the tones is correct.

In fact this expensive device was supposed to speak Thai sounds.

Didn't work at all - in fact after the Thai trying to sell me the device kept insisting the Thai tonal output was correct.

I got her to listen to some words and tell me what they were - she 'lost face' at this point as she couldn't understand a word of it - naturally I can never go in that shop again.

I am also trying to buy a decent computer based software program - dictionaryand translator.

Seen lots of adverts - but anyone have any recommendations.

I speak, read and write Thai reasonably well, so dont want anything too basic.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Edited November 3, 2006 by dsfbrit

[meadish_sweetball]

I would like to buy something that has both words and words in context and even a proper sentence translator.

Those demands cannot be met by the current state of language technology. Even between languages which are fairly close in terms of structure and cultural concepts, machine translation can only be a (rather poor) crutch, and feeding individual expressions with translations into a database takes so much work and memory space that it is still impractical.

Take a look at Babelfish http://world.altavista.com/ - try to find a webpage in Dutch, French or German and see how that comes out in English. Then consider that the structure of Thai is even more alien to English then either of those three.

Until artificial intelligence is able to associate in the way humans do, we will have to make do with our own ability to memorize and absorb... and use electronic tools for individual word translations.

I find the method of thai2english to be the best type of machine aided translation available at present. It provides all listed synonyms for each word instead of trying to guess at creating complete sentences for you (which means only the most common connotation of a word is used, often with unintelligible results) - with the thai2english way you can try to puzzle the sentence together yourself.

That being said, maybe there are better options than the one you are currently using.

If you could mention the brand and model of what you have it would probably be helpful.

[Rikker]

Yeah, if such a thing existed you would definitely find it with a huge bullet at the top of every Thai language forum.

And I agree that in a playing field without any real competitors, thai2english.com is the best anyone has done for now, because any translation engine which makes a "best guess" and doesn't show you other possibilities (like babelfish or translate.google.com), when they're wrong they can be very, very wrong. So thai2english is more like "assisted translation."

If only Thailand had more religious extremists or nuclear weapons, you can bet the US gov't would devote as much time to Thai machine translation as they have to, say, Arabic or Chinese.

[dsfbrit]

I have got an edict vocal 301 handheld device. It fits in the pocket quite well.

I dont use the 'vocal' speech part - it was 4000 baht.

http://www.thai-way.com/listproduct.php3?m...ic%20Dictionary

Like I say it has no sentence context - so its limitted - but useful if I know roughly what the word is and have forgotten how to spell it (say) and /or its tone.

I think it does what it says it does and is not very expensive.

The 15000 baht handheld device was a cyberdict - http://www.cyberdict.com top of the range - not sure of the number now.

Below is the online 'search' for one of the dictionary providers for this device - try 'takeoff' and the example is 'to take off you california' huh?.

I tend to use words like this to try out these handheld devices - to see if it differentiates between take off / remove a shirt and the plane takes off.

The handheld translation seemed to mirror the translator on the website with its quality - tt was not much better anyway in my opinion.

It also seemed to be designed for Thais to learn English as most of the sounds were there for the English words.

Wheras many of the Thai words sounds were wrong and many missing.

http://www.cyberdict.com/dict/

Its probably not that bad really, but as it was advertised in the handout to be a fantastic device I was very disappointed.

If translation is not possible - and I agree it probably is not yet - how about a good handheld with decent sentence context. Know of any???

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Edited November 3, 2006 by dsfbrit