Online dictionaries

[Warren Smith]

What is the current "state of the art" for online general-purpose online dictionaries?

 

For the past couple of years I have been favoring Weblio, but now it seems that it is often causing my system to hang (don't know why). What is a good alternative?

 

Warren

 

[Asheli Mosley]

I like to use this dictionary called aruku (http://www.alc.co.jp/) 

Asheli Mosley

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Honyaku E<>J translation list" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to honyaku+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Susan Murata]

I use the following, but never depend on only one online dictionary. 

https://www.sangyo-honyaku.jp/dictionaries 

www.onelook.com

honyakustar.com

and Jim Breem's

wwwjdic 

Susan Murata

2016年4月14日木曜日、Asheli Mosley<ashel...@gmail.com>さんは書きました:

--
モバイル Gmail から送信

[Kirill Sereda]

Sometimes even Linguee can be useful:

 

http://www.linguee.com/english-japanese

 

Kirill Sereda

[John Stroman]

Warren,

The connection with Weblio gets interrupted if you try to search while all the advertisements are loading. You can try simply waiting a few seconds between searches, or if it gets stuck, opening in a different tab and going back to delete the former one after a few minutes.

I've come to prefer Sangyo for patents now that I have learned how to tweak the search features. The tree even has a patent/IP branch under the business category.

I agree with Ashlei that Eijiro has improved considerably for idiomatic Japanese, but my favorite is Honyaku Star. Jim Breen's is best for literary and cultural terms. Lingee provides side-by-side text comparisons in context, which can be useful, but it seems to be unmonitored for accuracy (perpetuating some of the garbage). I'll have to give Onelook a try.

John Stroman

[Susan Murata]

Onelook is English only but still very useful. <g>

Susan Murata

2016年4月14日木曜日、John Stroman<stromana...@gmail.com>さんは書きました:

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Honyaku E<>J translation list" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to honyaku+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
モバイル Gmail から送信

[John Stroman]

Hi Susan,

I just discovered that, but it may still be useful as a thesaurus for J>E translators. Right now I like to use http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/synonym for English synonyms.​

John

----------------

[Bull Sarah]

I have a paid subscription to Kenkyusha Online and at 3,000 yen for six months it's a bargain.

I almost never need to use one of those free dictionaries anymore.

Sarah Bull

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 6:54 AM, John Stroman <stromana...@gmail.com> wrote:

Warren,

The connection with Weblio gets interrupted if you try to search while all the advertisements are loading. You can try simply waiting a few seconds between searches, or if it gets stuck, opening in a different tab and going back to delete the former one after a few minutes.

     In my experience, many of these advertisements are in video format and are driven by Adobe FlashPlayer.  The load these place on your system varies over time for reasons of which I am not quite sure, but it will occasionally hang up the system to the point where closing your browser and reopening is necessary.  Quite a nuisance!  I've taken to keeping Windows Task Manager open to the Processes tab to monitor this, and when things slow down too much I take a look in WTM, and if FlashPlayer is hogging too much memory I kill the process.  This loosens things up a bit then.  FP usually recovers after a while, but I occasionally find that FlashPlayer is utilizing more memory that my Firefox browser itself.  That aggression will not stand!

Matthew Schlecht, PhD
Word Alchemy
Newark, DE, USA
wordalchemytranslation.com

[Jon Johanning]

I sometimes need to refresh Weblio but it never crashes the whole browser (using OS X).

jjoha...@igc.org 

--

[Frank Apps]

I believe there are Flash Player viruses as well. Nevertheless if we always only use GoogleTranslate we may end up paying for accessing material derived from our own contributions ...

David Apps

[Eleanor Goldsmith, Kinsho Language Services]

Matthew Schlecht wrote:

     In my experience, many of these advertisements are in video format and are driven by Adobe FlashPlayer.  The load these place on your system varies over time for reasons of which I am not quite sure, but it will occasionally hang up the system to the point where closing your browser and reopening is necessary.

 

It was slowing my system down so much (coupled with the load from Trados and Dragon) that I decided to spring for a subscription to get the ad-free version, and the same on ALC. It’s much better now and the cost (a few bucks a month for Weblio and a similar price for the ALC annual subscription when averaged over the year – basically, the cost of a couple of cups of coffee at a café) is a drop in the ocean, especially weighed against the productivity improvement.

 

Incidentally, I hope no Honyaku members in the Kumamoto area have been overly inconvenienced by the quake last night. Take care.

 

 

Eleanor Goldsmith

Auckland, NZ

 

 

 

[Matthew Schlecht]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:44 PM, Warren Smith <warren...@comcast.net> wrote:

What is the current "state of the art" for online general-purpose online dictionaries?

     Don't know about state of the art, but I generally operate with 8 online dictionaries open:

Jim Breen's WWWJDIC
Jeffrey's 和英／英和辞典 (some overlap with previous)
Eijirō 英辞郎 (アルク)
Sankyo
Honyaku Archives  (Ryan Ginstrom)
CiNii Scholarly & Academic Information Navigator
Linguee
Weblio

The WIPO site also has some good patent-related term search capability.

     Over the years, I know that some are better for one thing or another, and how many grains of salt to take with results from each.

     I miss Glovo (although Sankyo has much of its functionality), Big Globe Patent Terms, and Yamaoka, but the world rolls on...

[Sarah Alys]

I heartily second this. The overall quality of Kenkyusha Online, which is the online Green Goddess, is head and shoulders above all the free online dictionaries mentioned. Once you go Kenkyusha Online, you will never go back. It's one of the best investments I've ever made in my business. I too rarely use the free ones anymore, even the high-quality free ones.

I also supervise translators as a quality manager, and I can easily tell which ones are routinely using ALC or the Tanaka Corpus based dictionaries vs. those who use higher quality ones (including KOD). It's a pretty dramatic difference. I've had to ban all of my people from using Tanaka Corpus dictionaries due to the measurable quality problems that result. The freelancers using these were also completely unaware of their inaccuracy level until they switched.

I also use Linguee. It can be hit or miss but sometimes it's incredibly useful.

Alys Lindholm

[Frank Apps]

Regarding the comment "It was slowing my system down so much (coupled with the load from Trados and Dragon)", you could use two or more computers at the same time ....

David Apps

--

[Geoff Trousselot]

weblio never hangs on me, and I use ad blocking extensions in my browser. Maybe not a coincidence. Perhaps not ethical to share the word, but adding an ad blocking extension might fix the issue. 

Geoffrey Trousselot

[JimBreen]

On Friday, 15 April 2016 11:07:30 UTC+10, Sarah Alys wrote:

I heartily second this. The overall quality of Kenkyusha Online, which is the online Green Goddess, is head and shoulders above all the free online dictionaries mentioned. Once you go Kenkyusha Online, you will never go back. It's one of the best investments I've ever made in my business. I too rarely use the free ones anymore, even the high-quality free ones.

The Kenkyusha Online is indeed very good. It's much more than an online  Green Goddess in
that it provides one-click lookups in a heap of dictionaries including the 中辞典, ルミナス,
medical, etc. dictionaries as well as 大辞林. I have noticed too that often rare terms show up
in the Japanese translations in the リーダーズ＋プラス EJ dictionary when they are missing
from the JEs.

Sarah also wrote:
> I also supervise translators as a quality manager, and I can easily tell which ones are routinely using ALC or the Tanaka Corpus based dictionaries vs. > those who use higher quality ones (including KOD). It's a pretty dramatic difference. I've had to ban all of my people from using Tanaka Corpus 
> dictionaries due to the measurable quality problems that result. The freelancers using these were also completely unaware of their inaccuracy level
> until they switched.

What exactly are the "Tanaka Corpus based dictionaries"? The Tanaka Corpus is a collection
of about 170k JE sentence pairs containing about 30k unique Japanese terms. It's not a
dictionary in any form (I began using it as a source of example sentences in WWWJDIC in
2003 and a number of other sites and apps have followed. The quality of the sentences is
not great although a group of Japanese native speakers has been doing a lot of work on it
lately.)

Cheers

Jim

[James Watt]

I hust had a look at the Kenkyusha site, but I'm not familiar with the different databases so I don't know the difference between the regular and advanced subscriptions.

Is the advanced version worth the extra 3000 yen?

(I mostly use Weblio and my old electronic dictionary.)

James Watt

[Kirill Sereda]

Jim Breen asks:

 

>> What exactly are the "Tanaka Corpus based dictionaries"?

 

And this is a very legitimate question.  I’ve never heard anything about “Tanaka Corpus-based dictionaries”.  The Tanaka Corpus is a very useful collection of colloquial phrases that can come handy when brushing up on one’s conversation skills, but not as tool for actual translation work.  Why would anyone consider using it as a professional tool is beyond me.

 

Kirill Sereda

[Sarah Alys]

Hi Jim,

Sorry, I phrased that badly--I meant to say dictionaries who use the Tanaka Corpus as the basis for their example sentences. As you say, the quality of the sentences is not great. I don't know the extent to which this affects translators in other fields, but definitely for anime/fiction/etc. translators, things fall apart pretty quickly if they're relying only on TC examples. If these dictionaries are the only ones they use, they aren't exposed to example sentences that give them a firm and correct understanding. On average they're also unaware of the history & limitations of the corpus; they don't actually even realize it's a corpus they're looking at rather than examples written by a dictionary editor. So they give the wrong kind of weight to what they read. I'm very interested by the recent work on it that you mentioned, though. Is there a good place where I can read more about it?

Unrelatedly but while you're here--I don't think I've ever actually thanked you, and I should. Your site was a lifesaver to me back in college (1999-2003). Besides the self-evident awesomeness of multiradical kanji lookup, which I still use, the romaji lookup & the link to Access meant I could use all the site features equally well from any computer, anywhere, which was just amazing in those years. It was just at that point where a reasonably savvy user with a decent amount of time on her hands could manage set up her own Windows machine to do what she wanted it to with Japanese, but without putting in that work auto-detect in browsers didn't work well, fonts were all messed up, etc. So if you went to the library, or a friend's house, or anywhere else, you could be SOL just trying to load a Japanese website correctly, let alone anything else. All of that is so easy these days I hardly think about it, but back then I had your Japanese page's URL memorized because I was constantly finding myself in need of it. So, thank you for all you've done for me and all the others like me. :)

Best,
Alys Lindholm

[Sarah Alys]

James, that's a good question; I have the advanced but I've been on auto-renew for so many years I had to remind myself what the difference was.

It looks like these dictionaries are not included in Standard...

英和コンピューター用語辞典
理化学英和辞典
医学英和辞典
研究社ビジネス英和辞典

...and they're definitely the ones I use the least. When I'm translating medical/psychology journal articles it's nice to see what they have to say, but I can go months without ever looking at or thinking about them. Bottom line I think my decision to go advanced was strictly a "3000JPY isn't that much more, so why not" sort of decision, rather than Advanced bringing me anything I use every day translating fiction. I would guess it depends on your specialty. For 和英 purposes what you really get a ton of use of are the three in the standard package:

新和英大辞典、新和英中辞典、ルミナス和英辞典

As Jim Breen said, KOD is actually more than the online GG; the ability to compare entries between these 3 for the same word, and then click on over to the 大辞林 for good measure when you want to, is a very nice perk.

On the 英和 side of things I can't give too many details, since I rarely use it. IIRC リーダーズ+プラス goes pretty crazy trying to cover English slang, to the point where you sometimes get surreal results.

HTH,
Alys Lindholm

[James Watt]

Thanks very much, Alys. Maybe I'm losing my site search karma, but I couldn't find a specific list of what is also included in the advanced subscription anywhere. ("All Kenkyusha dictionaries are included" isn't exactly clear.)

I already have the old version of 理化学英和辞典 on my electronic dictionary, but I bought that eight or nine years ago, so it could use an update. The other three will come in handy too, so I've decided to get myself a subscription as well. Thanks for the recommendation.

/Also, I must remember to stop posting from my smartphone. It inevitably ends with spelling mistakes.

James Watt

[BTB]

Hi

I think some of you may be interested in a time-saving macro for Microsoft Word that opens multiple online dictionaries at the same time. You select the Japanese word/phrase you want to look up, and then run the macro. A drawback is that it spawns many Microsoft Explorer windows that must be closed each time you run the macro.

Link:

http://www.beabettertranslator.com/home/macros-for-microsoft-word/vba-multi-site-word-lookup

I suppose I should disclose that I wrote this macro a while ago and also administer the linked website above. 

Regards,

Brian Boland

[Warren Smith]

Thanks. This soundsuseful. I have been meaning to write just such a macro -- along with a companion single-keystroke macro to close all the windows when I am done looking at them.

 

W

---

From: hon...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hon...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of BTB
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 6:34 PM
To: Honyaku E<>J translation list
Subject: Re: Online dictionaries

[Warren Smith]

A week or two ago I started a thread on online dictionaries, complained that Weblio was so filled with ads, etc, that it caused my computer to slow down.

 

Turns out that I was using the Chrome browser, which was so filled with with hidden parasitic add-ons (added by a Trojan), that the interaction of the parasitic add-ons with the adware from Weblio caused my computer to undergo maddeningly reduced performance.

 

I cleaned my Chrome browser using a utility, http://www.combofix.org/  (which, as far as I can tell is clean) and now Weblio works just fine.

 

All of the other dictionary suggestions are still very appreciated, and I am still messing with them, but it's nice to see that the original frustration has been solved.

 

Warren

 

PS: This is a "not-honyaku" off-topic aside (and is not to be the subject of lengthy threads that are contrary to the purpose of this forum), but as long as I am talking about performance issues with my online dictionaries, and my computer in general, here is something I sent to my family regarding my troubleshooting. As translators tend to be solitary so often don't have the colleagues with which to discuss these issues, I posting this to my (virtual) colleagues here as a service, but any follow-on discussion of this post should be sent either to me personally or to not-h...@googlegroups.com (which is set up to handle discussion by the honyaku cohort that is not directly associated with the primary mission of this forum).

 

 

------------

My computer was sick, but is running better now. I thought I would pass on some of what I found (all of it free and, I believe, all of it safe).

 

Here is a good anti-virus program that I downloaded from Microsoft when trying to figure out why my computer was running so poorly. It found and deleted several Trojans on my machine that other virus scanners had left behind.

My machine runs much better now. (I think this is the 64-bit version -- I don't know if your machines are 64 bit or 32, but there is a link under the Download Now banner to select the version.) I suggest you might run it.

You can trust this because the link is directly with Microsoft.

https://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx

 

Also of very high value to me was Ccleaner.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

This link is directly with piriform, and it is "legitimate" enough that Best Buy sells this software. The "registry" tab resolved hundreds of registry issues in my machine, making it run much better than before, without introducing any problems (at least, not that I have found so far).

This is also good for managing startup programs, etc.

 

For real-time virus projection, I have just gotten rid of Malware Bytes (which I discovered was causing HUGE performance issues), and replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

Again, this is directly from Microsoft. (I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google, for example, as I really have no choice, as, by definition, it already has access to my machine... Brennan -- am I wrong in this?

 

One other security scan I ran (which is somewhat more sketchy, I guess, but came recommended, and found hundreds (literally!) of hidden malware add-ons in my version of Chrome (perhaps added by the aforementioned Trojans?) is the following.

http://www.combofix.org/

This was recommended (if I recall correctly) by [REDACTED] last year (when I was having problems in Japan), but doesn't seem nearly as "legitimate" as some of the others. That being said, I was very impressed with all the parasites it seems to have cleaned out from Chrome.

On the other hand, three three Trojans that the Microsoft scanner found and removed were found after I had run this Combofix, so it is entirely possible that they were left on my machine by Combofix.

 

Given this, I suggest that you run the first of the three programs, above, and await [REDACTED]'s comments on the last one.

 

Also -- [REDACTED], I have recently found ProcessExplorer

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx

It seems far more powerful than TaskManager/Resource Monitor. While it is not a Microsoft product (I don't think), the download link is a Microsoft site, and Microsoft is listed as the publisher, so I trust it pretty well.

[John Stroman]

Warren,

Thanks for the update. Would you mind sharing your system information? I recently switched to Win10 (clean installation) and still seem to have some problems with the advertising blitzkrieg on Weblio.

The Microsoft cleaner sounds promising.​

John Stroman

----------------

--

[Warren Smith]

Crud. The "combofix" link I sent you is not for the right "combofix" software. While it is probably not a problem, it is not the software I am recommending, and is alarmist (trying to sell you removal services that are not necessary).

I DO NOT RECOMMEND the software at the combofix.org link.

 

My apologies.

 

Warren

[Warren Smith]

Did more research -- the link that I sent for Combofix is a spoof site PRETENDING to be combofix, instead tricking people into running "Scareware" (that is, malware that tells you that you have something wrong with your machine, and then tries to sell you expensive software to fix it). DO NOT GO TO COMBOFIX.ORG.

 

Instead, here is a link to download the *actual* combofix software. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/combofix/

 

Please, all, accept my deep apologies for sending the wrong link. Hopefully few of you actually installed the spoof program (called "SpyHunter"), as it will give you pop ups, interrupting you, until you get rid of it.

Note that SpyHunter may or may not be legitimate spyware protection -- it is hard to tell, because in this industry there is a cottage industry is setting up fake reviews for supposed anti-malware programs to drive traffic to the malware programs. While SpyHunter might be legitimate, I do not recommend it. If you have downloaded and run the software from the link I posted, I suggest that you uninstall it, and instead run the real utility form the bleepingcomputer link, above.

 

My apologies to all of my colleagues again (and also for hijacking the Honyaku forum for non-translation discussions).

 

Warren

 

 

 

---

From: hon...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hon...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Warren Smith
Sent: Friday, April 29, 2016 1:29 PM
To: hon...@googlegroups.com; 'Brennan Smith'; 'Alex Smith'; rampaging...@gmail.com
Subject: RE: Online dictionaries
Importance: High

Crud. The "combofix" link I sent you is not for the right "combofix" software. While it is probably not a problem, it is not the software I am recommending, and is alarmist (trying to sell you removal services that are not necessary).

I DO NOT RECOMMEND the software at the combofix.org link.

 

My apologies.

 

Warren

 

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 11:21 AM, Warren Smith <warren...@comcast.net> wrote:

A week or two ago I started a thread on online dictionaries, complained that Weblio was so filled with ads, etc, that it caused my computer to slow down.

 

Turns out that I was using the Chrome browser, which was so filled with with hidden parasitic add-ons (added by a Trojan), that the interaction of the parasitic add-ons with the adware from Weblio caused my computer to undergo maddeningly reduced performance.

 

I cleaned my Chrome browser using a utility,  [WRONG LINK]  (which, as far as I can tell is clean) and now Weblio works just fine.

 

All of the other dictionary suggestions are still very appreciated, and I am still messing with them, but it's nice to see that the original frustration has been solved.

 

Warren

 

PS: This is a "not-honyaku" off-topic aside (and is not to be the subject of lengthy threads that are contrary to the purpose of this forum), but as long as I am talking about performance issues with my online dictionaries, and my computer in general, here is something I sent to my family regarding my troubleshooting. As translators tend to be solitary so often don't have the colleagues with which to discuss these issues, I posting this to my (virtual) colleagues here as a service, but any follow-on discussion of this post should be sent either to me personally or to not-h...@googlegroups.com (which is set up to handle discussion by the honyaku cohort that is not directly associated with the primary mission of this forum).

 

 

------------

My computer was sick, but is running better now. I thought I would pass on some of what I found (all of it free and, I believe, all of it safe).

 

Here is a good anti-virus program that I downloaded from Microsoft when trying to figure out why my computer was running so poorly. It found and deleted several Trojans on my machine that other virus scanners had left behind.

My machine runs much better now. (I think this is the 64-bit version -- I don't know if your machines are 64 bit or 32, but there is a link under the Download Now banner to select the version.) I suggest you might run it.

You can trust this because the link is directly with Microsoft.

https://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx

 

Also of very high value to me was Ccleaner.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

This link is directly with piriform, and it is "legitimate" enough that Best Buy sells this software. The "registry" tab resolved hundreds of registry issues in my machine, making it run much better than before, without introducing any problems (at least, not that I have found so far).

This is also good for managing startup programs, etc.

 

For real-time virus projection, I have just gotten rid of Malware Bytes (which I discovered was causing HUGE performance issues), and replaced it with Microsoft Security Essentials.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security-essentials-download

Again, this is directly from Microsoft. (I trust Microsoft more than I trust Google, for example, as I really have no choice, as, by definition, it already has access to my machine... Brennan -- am I wrong in this?

 

One other security scan I ran (which is somewhat more sketchy, I guess, but came recommended, and found hundreds (literally!) of hidden malware add-ons in my version of Chrome (perhaps added by the aforementioned Trojans?) is the following.

 [WRONG LINK] 

[KIKO Sumi]

Hi, Stromanさん

My system is Windows 10, and I could clean up Chrome perfectly with 

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/cleanup-tool/

This is an official cleanup tool of Chrome. This made Weblio site display faster.

KIKO Sumi, in Chiba, Japan

2016年4月30日土曜日 0時34分29秒 UTC+9 John Stroman: