Since I learned Mandarin Chinese and American English separately, I do not have an Chinese-English/English-Chinese dictionary. I have one dictionary for each language. For my latest project involving “Word of the Week” (in which I am going through a list of characters covered in the Taiwan school system), I needed to find an accurate and appropriate dictionary to provide the translations. My own translations are most likely not as accurate.
I tried Yahoo!奇摩字典 and found exactly what I prefer in a dictionary. My problem with dual language dictionaries is that the dictionaries tend to attempt to provide a one to one correspondence between terms in a language. However, that is usually never the most accurate translation. I prefer a translation of the definition to get the most accurate understanding of the term. Which is exactly what this dictionary does.
I was able to compare the English translations from Yahoo!奇摩字典 to the Chinese definitions from 國語小字典 (the mini dictionary from the Taiwan Ministry of Education). The results were very close. The first definition is usually a direct translation of the meaning of the word. Subsequent translations were translations of the different meanings from the mini dictionary. It was very accurate. I am really picky about dual language dictionaries, and I strongly recommend Yahoo!奇摩字典 for a Chinese-English dictionary.
Pingback: My preferred Chinese-English online dictionary | The translation world | Scoop.it