Motivated by Haruki Murakami’s 村上春樹 latest novel “After Dark” アフターダーク (which somehow reminded me of “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” 나는나를 파괴할 권리가 있다 by Young Ha-Kim 김영하), I came to think a lot about the dynamics and psychology behind life in big cities. During my first months in Shanghai, I learned that this city can be a great and inspiring, but also a very dangerous and sad place. Shanghai is a city of contrasts. It’s always interesting, but not always easy. It’s fascinating, yet it has an extremely ambivalent character. The same is true for its people.

Students of foreign languages know that it can get very very tiring to look up words in paper dictionaries if you’re translating a difficult text with plenty of new words. Especially Chinese is a very tiring language in this way, as looking up an unknown word usually requires searching for a character by its radicals. Electronic dictionaries provide an alternative here. But good ones usually start around 100-150 Euros, roughly half the price of an EeePC, and are still not very convenient if you’re reading text on a computer screen.

Computers offer the comfort of having everything you need in one place. You can take advantage of this by downloading desktop translation software that will translate words for you into any language by just one click. The way this works is as follows: move your mouse over a word you want to have translated, apply a pre-defined key combination (usually something like ctrl + right mouse button) and a window will pop up showing you the translation of the word you’re looking for. This will save you the trouble of digging through your dictionary over and over again.

Granted, sometimes it’s too easy to look up words — so you easily forget things. The time required to re-check the dictionary is just too marginal But I’m pretty sure that most people would still like to know about the opportunities these programmes offer. The most popular ones are Babylon, Lingoes and Stardict, but there are plenty more for all major operating systems.

Babylon (Windows-only/Shareware)
> www.babylon.com

Being one of the first programmes on the market, Babylon was the first to spread the idea of desktop translation software in its current form. Although it took off as a free software project, the programme became commercialized some time during the dot com bust. Although criticized for various issues concerning the architecture of the software, Babylon today remains one of the most popular translation programmes, partly due to its early start, but also due to the parent company’s partnership with many big names in the language business — Oxford University Press, Merriam-Webster, Langenscheidt, Taishukan etc.

I have personally used Babylon (5.0) for a long time without any major problems, except for my license having been revoked every now and then. Apart from that, it’s a neat little programme that reacts quite fast, even on older systems. It also has a built-in OCR (optical character recognition) engine that can recognize text even in applications that usually don’t support copy & paste (e.g. Flash videos). Surprisingly, there also seems to be a free version of Babylon for the Chinese market (Babylon中文版), offering free translations back and forth between English and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. When accessing babylon.com from China, users are automatically redirected to babylonfree.cn. When checking form abroad, open babylonfree.cn to check out the free Chinese version.

Lingoes (Windows-only/Freeware-Closed Source)
> www.lingoes.net

In recent years I have tried to increasingly use and support free software projects. While Lingoes is not exactly free in the sense of open source software, it’s a free and viable alternative to Babylon, with dictionaries available for every imaginable language. The big advantage here is that there are also dictionaries available for cross-translations, e.g. Japanese-Chinese — the reason probably being that the programme seems to have been created in China, or by a Chinese — as the domain whois suggests. Most of the dictionaries are no-name, but increasingly more ‘big names’ appear on the programme’s download page, such as Merriam-Webster, Cambridge and Longman.

Although Lingoes reacts much slower than Babylon if you load a large number of dictionaries by default, it has a large variety of useful features and translation modes, such as sentence translation through Google Language, Altavista’s Babelfish, Yahoo etc. The programme seems to be updated regularly and considering its Chinese origin, users can be sure that once in a while dictionaries will be available for Lingoes that would otherwise not be available for free

Update (2009-10-01): As much as I would like to praise Lingoes, there are few issues that I’ve noticed after using the programme for about a year. First of all, Lingoes has an extremely annoying update notification, which doesn’t only tell you about updates available, but also forces you to update, since the programme expires after a certain period of time, which is an absolute no go and might imply that the author will make the application commercial at some point. As far as it stands, I don’t recommend using Lingoes.

Stardict (Linux, Windows, others/Freeware-Open Source)
> stardict.sourceforge.net

Stardict is the most popular solution among open source enthusiats and for Linux users. With a widely supported dictionary format, it is the perfect playground for techies and receives lots of support from its extensive user base. Stardict can read Babylon dictionary files if converted by a third-party programme. It’s available as a portable application (which runs right from your USB without the need to install anything) and its dictionary format is supported by WeDict, an iPhone dictionary application.

Its uncluttered GUI should enhance application stability and save a lot of memory when compared to Lingoes or Babylon. It is lacking behind the latter two in terms of accessibility, though. It’s largest plus is certainly the cross-platform compatability and the large number of dictionaries available.

Others

Apart from the aforementioned, most popular programmes, there are still lesser-known alternatives. MDic, for example, is a versatile Linux-based programme that supports many different dictionary formats, including those of Babylon and Stardict. Lingopad started off as a German-English dictionary but evolved far from there and looks like a promising project. PowerWord is widely used in China but seems to suffer from low translation quality and various application issues. Also, it’s not free.

For students of Chinese, I very much recommend Wenlin. It’s basically a text editor with an extremely outdated GUI that shows you translations of the words while you hover over them with your mouse. Although a very old concept, the included dictionary is one of the best English-Chinese-English dictionaries in general and offers huge secondary information on words and characters, like stroke order, character origin and plenty more. It all comes at a price, though. Make sure you check out the Demo version before buying.

> Wenlin.com (Windows, Mac, Linux/Shareware)

Es wird oft vergessen, dass Leipzig, als Teil der ehemaligen DDR, nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ursprünglich zunächst von den Amerikanern besetzt wurde. Eine Ausstellung, die sich diesem Thema widmet, findet zur Zeit in Markkleeberg im Rudolf-Hildebrand-Internat statt. Neben Fotos zeugen zahlreiche Berichte und Ausschnitte aus Tagebüchern von den Begebenheiten.

Info: Die Ausstellung gründet sich (meinem persönlichen Eindruck nach) zu einem Großteil auf Ausschnitte eines Buches von Jörgen Möller: “Die amerikanische Besetzung des Leipziger Südraumes”, ISBN 3936341079 (> Amazon.de, > Schkeuditzer Buchladen).

During my stay in Seoul, I was searching the bookstores for contemporary (South) Korean literature, when one of the sales girls handed me this book. Now, North Korea is not certainly not an easy subject to talk about — especially in East Asia where attitudes towards the country are to a large part influenced by prejudice and political propaganda. While I’m not a fan of the People’s Republic myself, I’ve been trying to get a clearer, unbiased image of the country through a lot of reading, so I can make up my own mind (especially travel reports come in handy here — see below).

I had been hearing about The Aquariums of Pyongyang before, when its author, Kang Chol-hwan, received an audience with George W. Bush in June 2005. With my trip to the DMZ planned for the next day, I thought I should get prepared and spent the night reading about Kang’s childhood in Pyongyang, his family’s background and his imprisonment in the Yodok labour camp.

His accounts of North Korea are unbelievable, fascinating and frightening all at the same time. Yet I don’t quite agree with his political attitude and there are a few parts of the story I’m not sure are completely true — e.g. when he told the story of his grandfather who was supposedly convinced to move to North Korea by a Yakuza boss. Still, Kang’s book is a captivating read and I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.