Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 1 of 6 24 October 2013 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
I'm not sure what the proper term for this is, but there are some online dictionaries that list lots and lots of professionally translated sentences containing the word you search for. Here are two:
http://www.linguee.fr/ is for French. Enter any word in French or English to get loads of example sentences that tell you not just what it means, but also how to use it.
http://www.ichacha.net/ is pretty much the same thing for Mandarin.
With Cantonese being so rare as a written language, and rarely if ever translated when it is, there is of course no such dictionary for Cantonese. The closest is good ol' CantoDict, which has example sentences, but they are far too few to compare to something like this. However, there has to be something like this for Spanish and I'm hoping you guys could give me a tip. I don't even know how to google for something like this. And of course, any other languages are also welcome.
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 2 of 6 25 October 2013 at 5:24pm | IP Logged |
Haha, I just realized Linguee also has translations between French on one hand and Spanish, Portugese or German on the other. So I guess I'm covered!
However, I had hoped others would have contributed with similar websites, but I guess they're not very common?
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jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map
| Message 3 of 6 25 October 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged |
How about this one for Irish?
http://www.potafocal.com/ (I found it this morning)
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5318 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 4 of 6 25 October 2013 at 6:58pm | IP Logged |
For completeness' sake, there's also:
Glosbe
MyMemory
Microsoft Language Portal
None of them features Cantonese, though. However, there are probably ready-made dictionaries based on the Cantonese CEDICT Project, which you're most likely already aware of.
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Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian
| Message 5 of 6 25 October 2013 at 7:06pm | IP Logged |
Awesome sources, thanks.
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Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| Message 6 of 6 25 October 2013 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
Great links! Thanks a lot!
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None of them features Cantonese, though. |
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At first I thought this was because of the official truth that Cantonese and other Chinese languages don't exist, but are only dialects of a single monolithic "Chinese", unvarying in time and space, but that doesn't appear to be the case. In Glosbe I find Hakka, Min Nan, Min Dong, Gan, Wu and Jin, as well as Literary Chinese, Old Chinese and Late Middle Chinese. Most varieties of Chinese seem accounted for, except Cantonese. Weird.
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However, there are probably ready-made dictionaries based on the Cantonese CEDICT Project, which you're most likely already aware of. |
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Dictionaries isn't a problem. I use CantoDict, which is pretty good (and when I find problems I point them out and they are corrected within a day). What I'd like is a database of translated sentences, but Cantonese just isn't translated. CantoDict does have example sentences, though, just not enough of them. I suppose it's up to me to add some more (I've applied to become an editor).
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