Making it Easier to Learn Mandarin Chinese By Qiu Gui Su, About.com

Translating Tools

There are many online Chinese – English dictionaries, and there are also tools for converting or annotating Chinese web pages into English or Pinyin (or both).

• Google Language Tools – When you use the Google search engine, you have the option of viewing translated versions of foreign-language pages. Google also has a page of language tools for translating texts or websites from one language to another.
• DimSum Web Page Annotator – This is a tool that will add Pinyin Romanization and English translations to a Chinese web page.
• Pinyin Annotator – This tool will add Pinyin to Chinese characters. Translations appear as popups if you hover the mouse over the Chinese. There is also a tool for adding Pinyin and translations to web pages.
• Chinese Perapera-kun – This is an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It accesses definitions from an online dictionary to supply translations and Pinyin of Chinese websites.

Character Conversions

Sometimes we need to convert simplified Chinese characters to traditional and vice-versa, or convert between the various types of phonetics. There are lots of software tools for these tasks.

• ConvertZ – This is the Swiss Army knife of Chinese character conversions. Outputs simplified, traditional, GBK, Big5, unicode notation, HTML notation, and even does MP3 tags.
• Chinese Character Conversion – An online tool to convert from Traditional to Simplified and vice versa.
• Romanization Converter – Converts between several different phonetic systems including Pinyin (with numbers or tone marks), Wade-Giles, Yale, and Bopomofo.