Chinese Translation Browser Plug-In

I'd like to learn Chinese. Although I lived there for nearly two years, my 'putonghua' is atrocious, and I'm Chinese-illiterate.

I do surf over to Chinese web sites once in a while, though, out of nostalgia for the place. Bi-lingual news sites, mostly, but due to the origin of the page, Chinese characters that nobody has bothered to translate are inevitably seen. Sometimes, when I rest my cursor over them, a small pop-up box appears, containing more Chinese text (this also happens with English-language web pages sometimes, with English text). This got me thinking.

Every Chinese character is unique. Each is pronounced as a single-syllable phoneme with one of four particular "tones", and can be written phonetically with the appropriate accent mark (this is called "pinyin"). For me, this is what makes Chinese such a difficult language to learn. The same sound, for instance "bi" (pronounced like"bee"), can be pronounced with a falling tone (sounds like "BEe," written: bì), flat tone (bee, written: bi, with a flat line over the "i"), rising tone (beE, written: bí), or what I call the boing tone (BEeE, written: bi, with a "U" shaped curve over the "i"). Of the four pronunciations of the sound "bi", I don't know two of them, one of them means "ink pen", and one of them is a rude word for the female genitals. This word, like many others, is not one you want to get wrong when trying to converse.

There already exist plug-ins that will allow your web browser to view Chinese characters. Since the computer already knows which character in a block of text has been drawn, it shouldn't be too hard to map the cursor position to a Chinese character on the page. A translator plug-in should be able to detect which character is being pointed to and, either immediately or after a short delay (you choose the setting), pop up the pinyin spelling of the character, along with a definition, if available*. Clicking on the character should play a sound file, or synthesized voice, demonstrating how the character is pronounced.

Of course, by itself, this product is not going to make you fluent in Mandarin Chinese (or Cantonese, depending on the software version). However, it should go a long way in helping language students to recognize different characters, and how to pronounce them properly.

Oh, and the reason I chose a web browser plug-in, rather than a dedicated software program for language instruction, is because the content on the web constantly changes. This would add variety to the lessons, and remove the chance that one would be actually reciting the lesson, rather than reading it.

*Some Chinese characters mean nothing by themselves, and/or serve to add meaning to other characters. Some characters can be combined with others to produce very different meanings than either would have by itself. This might make the translation of sentences difficult to do on the fly, as there are more than 6000 unique characters. Common combinations, of course, might be feasible to translate.