It’s been a while since our last update, but we’ve been working hard with small improvements, bug-fixing and adding a new feature that we believe will make happy a lot of people whose native language is not English.
We’re very excited to introduce the addition of new languages for the search, translations, kanji and the example sentences.
New languages in translations
Besides English, translations will also be available in Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish for selected words. These translations are directly taken from the great JMDict Project (also where most of the information in JapanDict comes from) and include:
- 336,000 entries in German from the WaDokuJT Japanese-German dictionary file compiled by Ulrich Apel.
- 121,000 entries in Russian from the Warodai project.
- 51,000 entries in Hungarian compiled by Istvan Varga using some advanced NLP techniques.
- 41,000 entries in Spanish from a combination of two dictionaries: the HISPADIC Japanese-Spanish dictionary and the RUI Japanese-Spanish dictionary compiled by Francisco Barberan.
- 29,000 entries in Dutch from the Waran Jiten project wiki at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
- 16,000 entries in Swedish using automation techniques to translate entries from English. The resulting translations have also been manually modified to improve quality.
- 15,600 entries in French from two different sources: the Japanese-French dictionary file from the Dictionnaire français-japonais project by Jean-Marc Desperrier and the French translations in the JMdict Internationalization project.
- 10,000 entries in Slovenian from the JASLOV dictionary file.
More information about these translations can be found in the WWWJDIC documentation.
Kanji meanings in more languages
The kanji dictionary also includes new languages coming from the KANJIDIC project. In this case, besides English, meanings in French, Spanish and Portuguese are also included.
Multiple languages in example sentences
Last but not least, the example sentences will also have translations in other languages. These are coming from the collaborative Tatoeba project and the following extra languages are now supported: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese.
Because of the collaborative nature of the Tatoeba project, anyone can add new translations or improve the current ones. To encourage collaboration a direct link to the Tatoeba sentence will be provided for every example.
Search in different languages
Multi-language has also been added to the search. By default, all searches will be done in English and Japanese, but it’s now possible to select other languages by clicking in the “Advanced” link.
Please try these new features and let us know what you think!