Electronic dictionary

An electronic dictionary is either a small handheld computer with integrated reference materials, or a PDA or a smartphone with a dictionary program. Electronic dictionaries are also programs that can be downloaded from the Internet or purchased on a CD-ROM or DVD and installed on a desktop computer or on a lap top, such as an Apple Macintosh or a Windows PC. Other electronic dictionaries can be searched and consulted online on the Internet. The computer-installed dictionaries can often be consulted directly from within any application that uses editable text. The term may be used in a broader sense to refer to the features of a machine-readable dictionary or spell checker.

A pocket-sized electronic dictionary

Content

Some electronic dictionaries contain only corpora for a single language (monolingual), but others are bilingual dictionaries and translation dictionaries and may also include, medical or legal dictionaries, thesauri, travel dictionaries, dictionaries of idioms and colloquialisms, a guide to pronunciation, a grammar reference, common phrases and collocations, and a dictionary of foreign loan words.

Electronic dictionary databases, especially those included with software dictionaries are usually extensive and can contain up to 500,000 headwords and definitions, verb conjugation tables, and a grammar reference section. Bilingual electronic dictionaries and monolingual dictionaries of inflected languages often include an inter-active verb conjugator, and are capable of word stemming and lemmatization.

Manufacturers and developers of electronic dictionaries may offer native content from their own lexicographers, licenced data from print publications, or both, as in the case of Babylon offering premium content from Merriam Webster, and Ultralingua offering additional premium content from Collins, Masson, and Simon & Schuster, and Paragon Software offering original content from Duden, Britannica, Harrap, Merriam-Webster and Oxford.

Standard features

Hand held electronic dictionaries resemble miniature clamshell laptop computers, complete with full keyboards and LCD screens. Because they are intended to be fully portable, the dictionaries are battery-powered and made with durable casing material.

Some of the features of both hand held dictionaries and software dictionaries include stroke order animations, voice output, handwriting recognition for Kanji and Kana, language-learning programs, a calculator, PDA-like organizer functions, encyclopedias, and time zone and currency converters, and crossword puzzle solvers. Dictionaries that contain data for several languages may have a "jump" or "skip-search" feature that allows users to move between the dictionaries when looking up words, and a reverse translation action that allows further looking up of words displayed in the results.

Writing systems

As well as for Roman script, electronic dictionaries are also available for non Roman, logographic, and right-to-left scripts, including (but not limited to) Arabic, Chinese, Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Russian Cyrillic, and Thai.

Dictionary software

Dictionary software generally far exceeds the scope of the hand held dictionaries. Many publishers of traditional printed dictionaries such as Langenscheidt, Collins-Reverso, OED - Oxford English Dictionary, Duden, American Heritage, and Hachette, offer their resources for use on desk top and lap top computers. These programs can either be downloaded or purchased on CD-ROM and installed. Other dictionary software is available from specialised electronic dictionary publishers such as Abbyy Lingvo, Babylon, Collins-Ultralingua, Mobile Systems and Paragon Software. Some electronic dictionaries provide an online discussion forum moderated by the software developers and lexicographers..

Hand held electronic dictionaries

Many manufacturers produce pocket calculator sized electronic dictionaries that use licenced dictionary content that use a database such as the Merriam Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus while others may use a proprietary database from their own lexicographers. Many devices can be expanded for several languages with the purchase of additional memory cards. Manufacturers include AlfaLink, Atree, Besta, Casio, Canon, Instant Dict, Ectaco, Franklin, Iriver, Lingo, Maliang Cyber Technology, Nurian, Seiko, and Sharp.

PDA and cellular phone based dictionaries

PDAs and smart phones such as the Palm, the Pocket PC, and the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch are small, often pocket-sized computers that can accept various software programs and databases. Full-featured dictionary programs and complete suites of dictionary databases are available. Some models offer stylus or touch screen entry, while others, especially models destined for Asian markets or customized for learners of Asian languages, allow the user to enter complex Asian characters by writing on the screen. It's usually possible to find PDAs, Cellphones, and software optimized for use in the user's native language, which can make them easier to use and more useful than dedicated devices optimized for native speakers of the language the user is trying to learn. Also, as these are essentially small computers, it's possible to expand them by adding other dictionaries and software. Thus you can have Greek, Thai, English, Sanskrit, Chinese etc. dictionaries all on one device, as well as multimedia programs, internet browsers, email programs, and whatever else is available for a given type of PDA or smart phone.

Online

In addition to their software packages, many dictionary publishers make their content available online either for a subscription, or access to a shortened free database of 40,000 - 100,000 definitions or to free access with only partial information. Others may make the entire database available for free casual use

Many dictionaries for special purposes, especially for professional and trade terminology, and regional dialects and language variations, are published on the websites of organisations and individual authors. Although they may often be presented in list form without a search function, because of the way in which the information is stored and transmitted, they are nevertheless electronic dictionaries.

Other online dictionaries include the non commercial type of collaborative dictionary. Some of these are built up from user contributions in a similar way to the Wikipedia, and allow for discussion among the contributors.While the databases are often extensive, they lack professional supervision, and may therefore not be reliable or authoritative lexicographic sources. Other online dictionaries are developed by resarech and educational institutions and the lexicographers retain ultimate control with what is included in the dictionaries and how the data are presented with a view to maintain reliability, as described in Nielsen/Mourier (2007).

Evaluation

There are differences in quality of hardware (hand held devices), software (presentation and performance), and dictionary content. Some hand helds are more robustly constructed than others, and the keyboards or touch screen input systems should be physically compared before purchase. The information on the GUI of computer based dictionary software ranges from complex and cluttered, to clear and easy-to-use with user definable preferences including font size and colour.

A major consideration is the quality of the lexical database. Dictionaries intended for collegiate and professional use generally include most or all of the lexical information to be expected in a quality printed dictionary. The content of electronic dictionaries developed in association with leading publishers of printed dictionaries is more reliable that those aimed at the traveler or casual user, while bilingual dictionaries that have not been authored by teams of native speaker lexicographers for each language, will not be suitable for academic work. Some developers opt to have their products evaluated by an independent academic body such as the CALICO.

Another major consideration is that the devices themselves and the dictionaries in them are generally designed for a particular market. As an example, almost all handheld Japanese-English electronic dictionaries are designed for people with native fluency in Japanese who are learning and using English; Japanese words must by entered by pronunciation, not by how they're written, so in most cases a user can't look up a word seen in print unless she or he already knows that word (not a problem for the native Japanese user, but it rather defeats the point for one learning Japanese). Similar limitations exist in most two or multi-language dictionaries and can be especially crippling when the languages are not written in the same script or alphabet; it's important to find a dictionary optimized for the user's native language.

Integrated Technology

Several developers of the systems that drive electronic dictionary software offer API and SDK - Software Development Kit tools for adding various language-based (dictionary, translation, definitions, synonyms, and spell checking and grammar correction) functions to programs, and web services such as the AJAX API used by Google. These applications manipulate language in various ways, providing dictionary/translation features, and sophisticated solutions for semantic search. They are often available as a C++ API, an XML-RPC server, a .NET API, or as a Python API for many operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.) and development environments, and can also be used for indexing other kinds of data.

References

• Nielsen, Sandro/Mourier, Lise (2007): Design of a function-based internet accounting dictionary. In: Henrik Gottlieb/Jens Erik Mogensen (eds.), Dictionary Visions, Research and Practice. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 119-135.

External links

Sample Electronic Dictionary

• [1] Multilingual Electronic Dictionary