Chinese NotesChinese-English dictionary

About the Project

The Chinese Notes web site is a non-profit, open source project for use in learning and translating Chinese, especially reading and analyzing Chinese texts and dictionary building. The dictionary includes a general Chinese-English dictionary, and a named-entity (people, places, publication titles, etc) database of Chinese names with their English equivalents. A corpus of historic, fictional, and literary Chinese is also part of the project.

Please join the low volume email group chinesenotes-announce(external link) for announcements of new features and other updates.

Goals

The overall goals the project are

  1. Create an online dictionary that is easy to use for everybody interested in Chinese language, including casual readers, students, translators, and academics.
  2. Create electronic tools that are useful for reading and analysis of literary Chinese texts.
  3. Share the source code and content with the general public. If you want to reuse source code or contribute source code or data then the GitHub project(external link) is built for you.

The technical goals the project are

  1. Create an open source dictionary with expanded coverage of literary Chinese for the study of historic texts.
  2. Follow lexicographic best practices, including distinguishing different word senses, separating English equivalents from defintions and notes, specifying the domains of word senses (modern Chinese, literary Chinese, computer science, and others), and providing part-of-speech.
  3. Provide analysis of word usage, including presence and collocations of terms in the corpus.

The intended users the web site are

  1. Students of Chinese language, literature, or history especially those needing to read literary Chinese text
  2. Translators, especially translators of Chinese literature and historic Chinese texts
  3. Anybody else exploring the Chinese language and literature

For more about the project see the Help, Dictionary Design, Corpus, and Style Guide pages.

References

Major sources used directly in the dictionary whose professional and freely shared work is gratefully acknowledged include:

In addition to the major sources listed above a full list of references is given on the References page. A current goal of the project is to add citations for each word sense in the dictionary using the system of abbreviations given in the Abbreviations page.

Sources, Reuse, and Development

This site and content is copyright of Nan Tien Institute, Australia. Assets may be copied, and re-used from the chinesenotes.com GitHub project at https://github.com/alexamies/chinesenotes.com(external link) under the terms and conditions listed here. The software for the website is also open source and is provided at https://github.com/alexamies/chinesenotes-frontend(external link).

The Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License(external link) (CCASE 3.0). applies to the content in the word and character dictionaries this site. The primary source for the word and character dictionaries is the CC-CEDICT(external link) Chinese - English dictionary, which also uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License(external link). That license applies to the content in the word dictionary this site as well, including the additional content in the dictionaries that does not derive from cc-cedict. Additional vocabulary was derived from the corpus of texts referred to on this web site and from consultation with the references listed in the References and Resources pages.

The source code for this site is site is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license(external link).

The materials provided on this site are provided in a best of effort manner as a student contributed project. There is no guarantee that the site will work bug free. The information provided has not been reviewed by experts but, rather contributed as an open source effort. There is no official endorsement of the web site or information provided on it.

Integrating with Chinese Notes

Please integrate with the data in the GitHub repository or link to the top level page of the site. Please do not link to individual pages.