Chinese Translator Reviews – Electronic Handheld Translators/Dictionaries for Chinese

Rationale:

好易通T8000 / Besta T8000 (Purchased March 2008)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator 4 out of 5.
• It has handwriting recognition of both simplified and full-form characters.
• It has handwriting recognition of some Cantonese-specific characters.
• You can also type characters using Mandarin pinyin, and various other radical-based methods.
• It can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese.
• You can use it to learn to write, since it gives you the stroke order for most characters in both full and simplified forms.
• It could be easily improved by making the modifications I suggest below.
• Overall, it's a very good translator compared with other models I've played with in shops but it's not perfect.

Bugs:

1. The device has some serious physical design flaws:
   • The On-Off button it too tall. It sometimes gets pushed when you close the screen.
   • The rear protruding plastic legs that balance the device on a table stick out so much as to damamge the provided material cover (or any other bag you happen to be carrying it in).
   • The device turns on when you recharge it. This slows the recharging process, and makes no sense.

好易通8600 / Besta 8600 (Purchased November 2005)

Rating & Summary:

• I give this translator 3½ out of 5.
• It has handwriting recognition of both simplified and full-form characters.
• It has handwriting recognition of many Cantonese-specific characters.
• You can also type characters using Mandarin pinyin, Cantonese romanisation, and various other radical-based methods.
• It can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese.
• You can use it to learn to write, since it gives you the stroke order for most characters.
• It could be easily improved by making the modifications I suggest below.
• Overall, it's a very good translator compared with other models I've played with in shops but it's not perfect.

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 Mandarin speaking button and it gets pronounced as ‘yan’ instead of ‘guang’!

2. The Mandarin pronunciation of ‘ting’ and ‘qing’ sound almost identical! The pronunciation should be improved.

3. Find the entry in the Chinese-to-English dictionary for 混血儿 then press the 中文 button. The machine pronounces 血 as ‘xie’ (which I believe is wrong). Now highlight the three Chinese characters and press F2CHN and the pronunciation in both pinyin and after pressing the 中文 button is ‘xuè’ (which I believe is correct).

4. The Mandarin pronunciation of the character 期² (a period of time) is in the 1st tone if the translator is in simplified character mode (thus giving the mainland pronunciation), and in the 2nd tone if the translator is in full-form character mode (thus giving the Taiwanese pronunciation) but the pinyin given in both cases is the Taiwanese one! The same applies to the characters 突, 质, 较 of 比较, and I suspect many others.

5. Type the two characters ‘ting1qing1’ (听清) in Mandarin or Taiwanese mode. Pronounce it in Mandarin and it incorrectly pronounces the first character as ‘yan’!

6. Type ‘sao3di4’ (扫地) in Mandarin mode. Pronounce it in Mandarin and it incorrectly pronounces the second character as ‘de’!

7. 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!

8. The Cantonese pronunciation of ‘sam’ (心, 深, etc.) is horrible. It currently sounds like ‘song’.

9. The Cantonese pronunciation of ‘si’ (屎) is wrong. It currently sounds like ‘fei’ but it should be ‘si’ just like 史.

10. The Cantonese pronunciation of ‘geng’ (鏡 and 頸) is wrong. It currently sounds exactly the same as ‘gang’ (亙 or 哽).

11. The Cantonese pronunciation of 覺¹ is wrong. It should be ‘gaau’ (sleep), not ‘gok’ (feeling).

12. The Cantonese pronunciation of the 2nd character of 按摩 (massage), in the English entry for ‘massage’, is in the wrong tone.

13. The Cantonese pronunciation of the 2nd character of 風扇 (fan), in the Chinese dictionary, is in the wrong tone.

14. The character 當 does not appear in the selection list when ‘dong’ is typed into the Cantonese input method.

15. The character 隨 does not appear in the selection list when ‘chui’ is typed into the Cantonese input method.

16. The character 蘿 does not appear in the selection list when ‘loh’ is typed into the Cantonese input method.

17. 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!

18. The English word ‘usually’ is sometimes incorrectly spelt ‘usaually’ in the Chinese-to-English Cambridge Encyclopaedia/Dictionary entries. Have a look at the entry for ‘aboriginal’ for example.

19. 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 recognised by the entry methods, but have no pronunciation and/or no dictionary entries.

2. Can you put the Cantonese romanisation on the screen in the dictionary entries just like you do for Mandarin? (See the Sidney Lau HK Government learning Cantonese books for the best Cantonese romanisation.)

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 Cantonese 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 Mandarin 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 ?? 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 Mandarin should give ‘gan dang’. Searching on ‘huo 车’ in Mandarin should give ‘huo che’. Searching on ‘chi sin’ in Cantonese 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.

Notes:

• I have reported these bugs and suggestions to Besta on 5 separate occasions (30 August 2006, 27 October 2006, 27 May 2007, 3 August 2007, 27 November 2007 - you can see how determined I am!) and have so far received no meaningful response from the company.