Monday, October 31, 2011

Referenced Theo. Expressions Updated to 2011-10-31 Version

The Referenced Theo. Expressions files available for download have been updated. They are available for download from the Referenced Theo. Expressions (Chinese + Pinyin + English) Downloads and Referenced Theo. Expressions (Chinese + Cantonese Romanisation + English) Downloads pages. These files are meant to be relatively extensive lists of theo. expressions as they have been found to be rendered in the Chinese publications. Versions sorted by English and versions sorted by romanization are both available.


The current version is now dated 2011-10-31. It contains 14,041 entries (+5766 alternate headings), compared to the 13,183 entries (+5064 alternate headings) that were in the previous version. For the Mandarin RTE data, Pleco, Wenlin, ChinaScribe, DICT, StarDict (for ColorDict, etc.), and iSilo data files are now available in addition to the PDF files. (We have not been able to make the StarDict data files work with the StarDict program itself, but they may work with ColorDict and other programs that read the StarDict format.)


Re this update, the one who produces the RTE said:

...it includes some scientific words and names from the November Awake! that bros might now want to look up.


...

Besides the November words, and a bunch of other additions and corrections, other improvements are:

  1. The PDF and iSilo files had an introduction with date and statistics, but other formats (ChinaScribe, Wenlin, Pleco, etc) could not. This inconsistency has now been fixed by giving RTE a Chinese name and an entry for itself in the dictionary, so if you're using a format that has no introduction then you can look up "RTE" to see it. (The introduction's wording has also been simplified.)
  2. Fixed a bug in the scripts which was omitting most of the BP course words from the PDFs (although they were counted in the statistics). The other formats were not affected by this bug.
  3. Improved the Cantonese romanisation by referring to a newer version of Cameron Wong's secular Cantonese dictionary (not yet online but he let me have a copy).

The old Submitting New Expressions subheading of both the Mandarin and the Cantonese download pages has been changed to the below in order to encourage more submissions and requests:

Submitting or Requesting New Expressions

If you come across a Chinese theo. expression that is not yet listed in the RTE material and you would like to submit or request it for inclusion in future versions of the RTE material, please email me about it and include as many of these pieces of information as you are reasonably able to:

  • Chinese characters (Simplified, Traditional, or both)

  • pinyin (zhèyàng or zhe4yang4 are both okay) [Mandarin page]

  • romanization, including type (e.g. Yale, Sidney Lau, etc.) [Cantonese page]

  • English equivalent

  • source (which theo. publication, page, paragraph)

Bookmarks have been added to the PDF files, and PDF annotation has been enabled on them, so “LN-A” (“Link Navigation-Annotation”) is included in their filenames. See the PDF Link Navigation page and the PDF Annotation (Notes & Highlighting) page for more information.


Note that the current version of Pleco for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad now supports flashcards and user-created dictionaries. So, the RTE Pleco Instructions file now contains instructions for installing the RTE Pleco files in Pleco running on these devices.


As a reminder, note that the Referenced Theo. Expressions (Chinese + Pinyin + English) Web Lookup and Referenced Theo. Expressions (Chinese + Cantonese Romanization + English) Web Lookup pages are now available as well. Rather than containing download links to the RTE data files, they each contain a web form that can be used to look up RTE information.


Thanks go out to the ones who helped to produce this set of resources.