Welcome to Chinese Aide, a framework on top of a Mandarin Chinese-English dictionary with the goal of making real-time Mandarin-to-English translation faster and more practical.

The tool accepts English text and Chinese character queries like a typical dictionary, but it's at its most useful when dealing with the standard romanization system pinyin.

Suppose you hear a phrase spoken in Mandarin, but have difficulty looking it up directly in a standard dictionary. You might (like the author) have trouble distinguishing tones in casual speech, or knowing which syllables are parts of distinct expressions. Chinese Aide attempts to provide a framework for dealing with these issues.

Start by entering the pinyin for the phrase (any tone numbers 1 through 5 you can provide may narrow your results, but they are optional):

Each row of results is a unique framework for building a possible translation. Rows considered more likely to result in a good translation appear towards the top.

A highlighted background indicates ambiguity: there are multiple possible translations for that part of the phrase. Click each highlighted entry to choose among these possibilities and thus construct your translation:

You can test your constructed phrase against real-world data at any time by using the links at the right-hand side of the row, which automatically feed your translation (in the form of its Chinese characters) to various Chinese-language search engines. This area also contains a text field with these same characters so that you can easily copy them to the clipboard if necessary.

Notes:

Tone sandhi (contextual tone change) is not reflected; for example, to obtain 你好 ("hello"), you should enter "ni3 hao3", even though you would pronounce it ni2 hao3. (Of course, you can also enter no tones at all, and choose among the available results.)

To match ü, as in 綠 (lü4, "green"), you can enter either "u:" or "v".