v5.022: Bigger Dictionary and Improved Traditional Support
Feb 17th, 2008 by trevelyan
We had a bug report identified at Chinese-Forums this weekend involving support for traditional Chinese in Adso. Mainland users probably didn’t notice, but Adso wasn’t detecting traditional characters automatically the way it used to. The reason for this was simple - we hadn’t reimplemented the automatic detection of the traditional script after the shift to V5. This is now fixed, and we’ve got a new release that solves the problem and adds another 1,500 or so new words and phrases to the dictionary (you guys rock!):
http://adsotrans.com/downloads/adso-v5.022.tar.gz
This all raises the question of how we should support traditional characters? We’ve been very weak on this before for a number of reasons:
- Server Speed: our server was previously a duct-tape and celeron beast running out of a back-alley somewhere in Beijing. I’ve got horror stories I’ll post about here sometimes, but the take-away has been major major speed and connectivity issues for users outside mainland China.
- Simplified Editing Environment: our dictionary editing scripts have always been dominantly simplified. This is a consequence of starting the project using GB2312, and continuing to use the same editing scripts as the software evolved. We haven’t had many complaints about this (except for Mark) though.
Whatever the reason, one consequence of all of this is that Adso is not as good at parsing traditional Chinese as simplified Chinese. We don’t automate the conversion to traditional on word submission in order to maintain the integrity of the dictionary, and most of our users contribute content in simplified Chinese. This has probably created a viscious circle in which the project is less useful to people in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Our recent server shift should at solve the speed/access issues though, and I think it’s a good time to take stock on making other changes. I’m actually at odds with Hank at ChinesePod about the importance of learning the traditional characters (I’m an advocate for it, he tends to see the world more practically). But I do think it’s important at least to enable the community of traditional users to help improve Adso. I would also have killed to be able to use Adso back when I needed to translate 古文 along with documents in the sort of pseudo-classical Chinese we get at the turn of the century, or even up through the mid 1960s when the simplification movement was only partially implemented.
As a first baby step towards this, as of yesterday, we’ve got a new “advanced editing page”. It looks about as awful as the simplified version (hey, design isn’t exactly my forte), but it works and so it’s now possible to edit/add traditional characters to simplified entries. Also - if you’re a traditional user and need something done, please harass me about it.
I’m one of the only people in Taiwan who uses your stuff (and gets complaints from local readers over it). Almost all the Taiwan bloggers here use zhongwen.com and xuezhongwen.net.