PowerWord () is a collection of

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

, English and bilingual

dictionaries A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

and supporting

proprietary software Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...

, published on

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

Kingsoft Kingsoft Corporation () is a Chinese software company based in Beijing. Kingsoft operates four subsidiaries: Seasun for video game development, Cheetah Mobile for mobile internet apps, Kingsoft Cloud for cloud storage platforms, and Kingsoft O ...

. Originally produced for the

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

platform, it is now available for

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

for

Nokia smartphones Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the Helsinki metr ...

, and is available online. The CD-ROM often prominently carries the label "CIBA", as well as Chinese characters.

Basic usage

The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

can be set to be either Chinese or English. The installer seems to use the system default location. Pointing the mouse at any word on the screen cause a small box to pop up with a brief definition and links to access a more expanded definition in the main program, to search the Web for that word using the company's search engine, or to hear the word spoken. The main program contains a text box at the top, into which may be typed (or pasted) an English or Chinese-character word or phrase to access the dictionary entries. If an exact match is not found, then the nearest entry is shown. A

speech synthesizer Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

is available to read many of the English entries (in an American accent) by clicking on the small loudspeaker. There are natural recordings of some words, while others are synthesized. The Chinese words can also be spoken by using recordings of single syllables (which means there is a problem with fluency when reading words of more than one syllable).

Problems and criticism

The 2002 version of PowerWord contained some

obscene An obscenity is any utterance or act that strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time. It is derived from the Latin , , "boding ill; disgusting; indecent", of uncertain etymology. Generally, the term can be used to indicate strong moral ...

English words as default translations of common Chinese terms. PowerWord corrected this in later versions, but many users failed to upgrade, so the obscene English words were commonly seen in Chinese shop

signage Signage is the design or use of signs and symbols to communicate a message. Signage also means signs ''collectively'' or being considered as a group. The term ''signage'' is documented to have been popularized in 1975 to 1980. Signs are any ki ...

as late as 2007. Translations in the PowerWord dictionaries are in general very brief, and a word's full connotations are not always explained. In some newer versions of PowerWord this situation can be improved by selecting better dictionaries from the main program window. Text can be copied from a dictionary and pasted elsewhere. However, when running the 2002 edition on non-Chinese versions of Windows (even ones that are Unicode-aware), the characters become

mojibake Mojibake (; , 'character transformation') is the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often ...

d when pasted, and the resulting text must be explicitly re-interpreted as

GB 2312 is a key official character set of the People's Republic of China, used for Simplified Chinese characters. GB2312 is the registered internet name for EUC-CN, which is its usual encoded form. ''GB'' refers to the Guobiao standards (国家标准), ...

using a character set translation utility. This problem does not exist when pasting text into the application. The font size of the program cannot be changed, which is an accessibility problem.

Coverage

Because the translations in PowerWord's dictionaries are brief, the application works best when dealing with well-defined, unambiguous technical words rather than normal words. It is supplied with several additional dictionaries of technical words in specific fields. The choice of fields is biased toward areas of high commercial profit, as can be seen from the list of dictionaries below.

List of dictionaries

The 2002 edition of the CD-ROM contains a total of 83 dictionaries, as follows: * The basic dictionary, which is always installed with the program (the others can be selected or de-selected in the advanced installation options). * Eight additional general-purpose dictionaries: "Kingsoft Detailed English–Chinese Dictionary", "A Modern English–Chinese Comprehensive Dictionary", "

American Heritage Dictionary American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

" (English–English), "An English–Chinese Graphic Dictionary", "A Senior Chinese Dictionary", "A Great International Standard Dictionary of Chinese Characters", and "American Heritage Dictionary (two-direction)" * Eight "computer and communication" dictionaries (including the "Longman English–Chinese Computer Dictionary" and the "Longman Chinese–English Computer Dictionary") * 11 dictionaries dealing with specialist vocabulary in various fields of industry and

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer ...

* 14 dictionaries dealing with specialist vocabulary in various fields of

science and technology Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an umbrella term used to group together the distinct but related technical disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The term is typically used in the context of ...

* 10 dictionaries dealing with the specialist vocabularies of various aspects of

business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for ...

* 9 dictionaries dealing with the specialist vocabularies of various aspects of

transportation Transport (in British English) or transportation (in American English) is the intentional Motion, movement of humans, animals, and cargo, goods from one location to another. Mode of transport, Modes of transport include aviation, air, land tr ...

* 5 dictionaries dealing with the specialist vocabularies of

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

(including

Traditional Chinese medicine Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an alternative medicine, alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. A large share of its claims are pseudoscientific, with the majority of treatments having no robust evidence ...

and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

) * 11 dictionaries dealing with the specialist vocabularies of various aspects of energy production and similar resources (mining, water) * 6 other specialist dictionaries on

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

agriculture Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...

husbandry Animal husbandry is the branch of agriculture concerned with animals that are raised for meat, fibre, milk, or other products. It includes day-to-day care, management, production, nutrition, selective breeding, and the raising of livestock. ...

forestry Forestry is the science and craft of creating, managing, planting, using, conserving and repairing forests and woodlands for associated resources for human and Natural environment, environmental benefits. Forestry is practiced in plantations and ...

and

firefighting Firefighting is a profession aimed at controlling and extinguishing fire. A person who engages in firefighting is known as a firefighter or fireman. Firefighters typically undergo a high degree of technical training. This involves structural fir ...

Controversy

In 2007, PowerWord was blamed by a furniture company for a racial slur printed on the label of a couch. When the Chinese characters for "dark brown" (simplified: 黑褐, pinyin: hei1 he4) are typed into a version of Kingsoft's Chinese-English translation software, it produces, among other translations, the words "

nigger In the English language, ''nigger'' is a racial slur directed at black people. Starting in the 1990s, references to ''nigger'' have been increasingly replaced by the euphemistic contraction , notably in cases where ''nigger'' is Use–menti ...

brown". The company has corrected this in the 2007 release of PowerWord.

References

External links

iCIBA
English version of the dictionary.
iCIBA
online version of the dictionary.

listing various versions, downloads, and purchase information. {{in lang, zh Dictionary software