This browser extension allows you to translate Chinese characters and words by simply clicking on them.
It is a port to Firefox on Android of the (desktop) Firefox extension of Leonard Lausen (https://github.com/leezu/zhongwen) which itself is a port of the Chrome extension of Christian Schiller (https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen).
The original zhongwen addon from Christian Schiller does support Android since V5. It is better maintained and is to be prefered for long time usage. Currently the only advantage of using Zhongwen-android is the possibility to open a word in pleco by clicking in the pop up.
Note: currently chrome does not support extension on android devices.
- Supports both traditional and simplified characters.
- Includes a recent version of the widely used CEDICT Chinese English dictionary.
- As a learning aid it uses different colors for displaying the Pinyin syllables, depending on the tone of the Chinese character.
- Highlights the characters whose translation is displayed in the pop-up window.
- Easy link to pleco for thorough character explanation.
- Some Zhongwen extension laptop features are currently not supported: interfacte to Skritter/grammar/vocabulary list.
On your android device, open firefox go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ and search for zhongwen-android.
Once Zhongwen is installed on your android device you can directly use it if you browse to a page containing chinese character and press on one of those. The popup will show up and be displayed for 4 seconds (configurable). You can also make the popup disappear by clicking on it. If you click on the pleco symbol in the bottom right it will open the pleco app to do a more detailed search. If you want to turn the extension off, click on the top right of the firefox window and goto the addons/modules configuration, there you can turn on/off each addon. In the addons configuration panel you can set:
- Default time the popup will be displayed before disappearing
- If you want to see both simplified/traditional character or just the one that match what you are reading
- The popup color
- To see the Zhuyin version
- To not display the pleco symbol if you don't want to use the pleco link functionality
By default, the pop-up window shows the following pieces of information:
- the Chinese charaters forming the word you're touching.
- the corresponding Pinyin. The individual Pinyin syllables are shown in different colors (see below).
- the English translation. Sometimes, Zhongwen finds more than one matching entry in its dictionary. In this case it shows you all of the matching entries.
If you want to see Zhuyin, a.k.a. Bopomofo, you can enable it via the options page (see below).
If you're learning Chinese, Zhongwen helps you remember the tone of each character by displaying it in a different color. It uses the following color scheme for showing Pinying syllables:
- First tone syllables are shown in red.
- Second tone syllables are shown in orange.
- Third tone syllables are shown in green.
- Forth tone syllables are shown in blue.
Zhongwen comes with a recent release of the CC-CEDICT dictionary. This dictionary is constantly updated, and each Zhongwen release will include an updated version of the dictionary.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
Copyright (C) 2019 AScemama