By Ian Tan
May 22, 2006

ARE dictionaries and encyclopaedias destined for the trash bin?

With more traditional reference texts going electronic, there seems to be little need for those heavy books that generations have lugged around grudgingly.
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Modern electronic dictionaries are small but feature-packed and online websites like Wikipedia are literally bursting with the world's knowledge.

Here is a quick take on what they can and cannot do.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

SUPER POCKET PAL

The Besta CD-618 Pro is out to convince everyone it is no mere electronic dictionary.

It contains the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (6th edition), and allows for quick Chinese, Japanese and Korean translations.

Designed in Taiwan, the gizmo aims at improving English standards via inbuilt grammar, vocabulary and even pronunciation tutorials.

Students weak in Mandarin may also benefit from the voice synthesiser that reads back almost every Chinese word displayed.

To attract the iPod generation, the gizmo plays MP3 music, records audio, displays short videos, lets you leaf through downloaded e-books and manages your schedule with organiser functions.

You may add memory cards to increase its features, but the Besta remains strongest as a language resource.

For example, the Cambridge Encyclopaedia feature sounds impressive but its articles are limited in scope and are all explained in Chinese.

What really caught my eye was the travel dialogue feature, which lists hundreds of commonly used phrases in English, Mandarin, French, Korean and even Cantonese.

Cantonese, like most Chinese dialects, is not easy to pick up because the sentence structure is quite different from standard Mandarin.

The Besta overcomes this by showing you the differing sentences and reading them out loud for you.

In fact, MediaCorp actress and Besta spokesman Xiang Yun claimed that the machine has better pronunciation of Mandarin than she does.

She told The New Paper she uses it to check the pronunciation of certain difficult Chinese phrases at work.

What the Besta does not offer is wireless Internet browsing, which would make it more powerful than any PDA out there.

The Besta CD-618 Pro is available at a promotional price of $698 till early June.

Online dictionaries (eg. www.merriamwebster.com, www.askoxford.com) have been around for years and they offer quick and powerful word searches.

ONLINE RESOURCES

More importantly, online thesauruses let journalists cheat when we run out of words to use.

For language nuts, the Babelfish translation engine (babelfish.altavista.com) is fun to play with as it offers many language options.

However, it often throws up weird sentences.

I asked it to translate 'Let's go to the zoo.' and its simplified Chinese translation came out as 'Given up towards the zoo.'

The Besta had no problems translating the same sentence, but that's why most online resources are free.

The most talked-about online resource now is Wikipedia, which is a free encyclopaedia written by users like you and me.
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Professor in her pocket: TV veteran Xiang Yun swears by her Besta CD-618 Pro.

Anyone can start a topic going, and anyone can add or delete content.

The belief is that the system is self-corrective and netizens will act if wrong information appears on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has proven to be a big headache for incumbent Encyclopaedia Britannica, which still charges US$69.95 ($111) for a year's subscription.

Britannica is still regarded more highly as it employs certified experts to write its articles, but it is hard to resist Wikipedia's free content.

Moreover, Wikipedia's open system has been caught up in controversy.

Last year, US journalist John Seigenthaler kicked up a fuss after a Wikipedia prank article accused him of being involved in US President John F Kennedy's assassination.

So, can you trust Wikipedia's 1.3 million articles?

That is a difficult question to answer, but all children know that it is the only place where you can find detailed articles on SpongeBob SquarePants or Pokemon.