English-Chinese Dictionary of Computer Terms

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英汉计算机术语双向词典    英漢電腦術語雙向辭典

©2001-2008 The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.

Overview

The CJK Dictionary Institute is engaged in the development and continuous expansion of a comprehensive lexical database of approximately three million Simplified Chinese (SC) and Traditional Chinese (TC) words, terms, and idioms covering general vocabulary, proper nouns, domain-specific terminology, and neologisms. This document introduces our comprehensive English-Chinese Chinese-English Dictionary of Computer Terminology, which contains about 100,000 SC and 100,000 TC entries, including acronyms.We have continued to proofread and expand this dictionary in 2005.

This dictionary covers both SC, used in the PRC and Singapore, and TC, used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and among overseas Chinese. SC is often converted to TC by code conversion, which leads to poor results. Two more advanced approaches are called orthographic conversion and lexemic conversion. The former is similar to American 'color' vs. British 'colour', whereas the latter corresponds to American 'gas' vs. British 'petrol'.

An example of orthographic conversion, marked "O" in the table below, is 头发 converted to 頭髮 and 出发 to 出發. An example of lexemic conversion, marked "L" in the table below, is 'laser', translated to 激光 in SC but to 雷射 in TC. For details, see Jack Halpern's paper The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion, presented at several international conferences.

Features

This dictionary has four major features that distinguish it from any other Chinese computer dictionary available today.

• Comprehensive: Currently covers about 60,000 terms based on highly reliable frequency statistics.
• Up-to-date: Constantly updated and expanded to include very recent terms, especially those appearing on the World Wide Web.
• Numerous Acronyms: Acronyms play a crucial role in computer terminology. This dictionary contains more than 10,000 acronyms, including the most recent ones, fully cross-referenced to the expanded forms.
• Traditional Chinese: the TC is not merely a code-conversion of the SC, but has been carefully proofread to ensure accuracy both on the orthographic and lexemic levels, as explained above.

Because of these features, this dictionary is an invaluable tool for translators and for use in various IT applications such as information retrieval (IR), machine translation (MT), and input method editors (IME).

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