Simple English to Japanese Dictionary Documentation

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Purpose

The purpose of this project is to create a free, online English to Japanese dictionary that is simple to use, yet comprehensive in scope, for research and/or study of the Japanese language.

Data

The publicly available data were garnered from the site at Monash University in Australia.

I have created a 'Mega' file so the user is neither limited by, nor confined to searching just one glossary file for occurances of their query. The present online dictionary contains 112,430 entries and is composed of the following files/glosses:

  1. The EDICT file
  2. Ron Schei's E/J Aviation Dictionary File
  3. The COMPDIC file (Computer Terminology)
  4. Japanese/English Life Science Dictionary File
  5. The FINDIC file (Kevin Seaver's glossary of financial terms)
  6. The GEODIC file of geological terminology
  7. The MKTDIC file (Adam Rice's business & marketing glossary)
  8. The University of Washington Japanese-English Legal Glossary

User Beware
In no way does the creator of this site claim that the data used are 100% accurate (see below). Keep this in mind when searching.

Usage

Most of the present browsers support the Extended Unix Character (EUC) set, so you shouldn't have to worry about downloading fonts, etc... However, the following may be useful if you encounter problems using the dictionary.

  1. Have the proper fonts installed on your operating system.
  2. Have one of the later versions of Netscape or Explorer. Just be sure that your browser can handle Extended Unix Code (EUC). Most available browsers handle EUC, so you shouldn't have to worry about it.
  3. Select the proper encoding under the encoding sub-menu of the view menu item in Netscape and/or Explorer. You want to select either: Japanese (Auto Detect) or Japanese (EUC-JP) or Japanese (EUC). Once you have the encoding properly set, you should be able to view the Japanese results without problem.

Searching

Presently, one can only search on English words, though this may be modified to include kana transliterations.

Search Types

Three types of searches can be performed on the database, though once a searchtype is selected, only this searchtype can be used for multiple Query Object searches.

  1. Global Default (Regular Expression Searches)

    The Global Default searchtype allows the functionality of string specific searches throughout the specified field. The Global Regex operators are:
    _matches any single character
    %matches 0 or more characters of any value (This is the default).

    Note: Using the "Global" searchtypes, there is no need to prefix or suffix the "%" or "_" operators to your Query Object when doing a search. In order to achieve successful searches, do not include them anywhere in your Query Object!

    The default operator for any "Global" search is "%" and is added to the querystring automatically at input. This is also true for the "_" operator.

    The Default searchtype is is your best bet for individual string searches within a given field.

  2. Unix Regular Expression Searches

    The Unix Regex searchtype provides access to the power of the UNIX standard regular expression syntax. The UNIX regular expression syntax provides far greater functionality than the Global syntax. The UNIX regex syntax does not use the '%' characters in the way the Global searchtype does (as outlined above). The syntax available for the Unix regex operators are:

    .matches any single character
    ^When used as the first character in a regex, the caret character forces the match to start at the first character of the string
    $When used as the last character in a regex, the dollar sign forces the match to end at the last character of the string
    [ ]By enclosing a group of single characters withing square brackets, the regex will match a single character from the group of characters. If the "]" character is one of the characters you wish to match you may specifiy it as the first character in the group without closing the group (e.g. "[ ]abc]" would match any single character that was either "]", "a", "b", or "c"). Ranges of characters can be specified within the group using the "first-last" syntax (e.g. "[a-z0-9]" would match any lower case letter or a digit). If the first charactr of the group is the "^" character the regex will match any single character that is not contained within the group.
    *If any regex element is followed by a "*" it will match zero or more instances of the regular expression.

  3. Exact Match

    Self-explanatory.

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Created on 12/12/98
Last modified on 16 October 2001 by achou@diderot.uchicago.edu.