This page sets out some resources that might prove useful (or even indispensable). Paper Republic has no affiliation to any of these products or companies, and receives no benefit for mentioning them here. Our thanks go to all the translators who have sent in suggestions for this page and, in particular Tony Blishen

And remember – no single resource can give you all the answers. The last (or sometimes first) resort is just to Google a character, compound or sentence and see what comes up. Fragments of poetry will often throw up the complete text and lead to an erudite and informative blog. The same for chengyu.

Paper Dictionaries and Thesaurii

These will always have their place, despite the advances of the internet.

• The Cihai (辞海) is a standard Chinese-Chinese dictionary, and also serves as an encyclopaedia. First published in 1936 and revised many times since.
• The standard workhorse of Chinese-English dictionaries seems to be the revised edition of the dictionary put out by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press (外研社). It's fat, relatively inexpensive, and has a fair number of good sample sentences, basic chengyu, and the names of rare diseases.
• The two-volume, 3500-page 汉英大辞典 published by 上海交通大学出版社 is a decent addition to the reference shelf.
• There's no shame in using a thesaurus when you're translating – how else are you going to come up with four synonyms for "expansive" in the space of three minutes? A particularly nice one is the Rogets Thesaurus, notable for grouping words under thematic categories – you first look your word up in a disambiguation index in the back, and once you've got the proper meaning of the word, you're off to a full page or two of likely-related words. Very satisfying.

Online Dictionaries – Chinese-Chinese

Han Dian (汉典)

Definitions of 75,983 single characters and 361,998 compounds and phrases, together with 32,868 chengyu. Will search a number of different ways including pinyin and by number of strokes overall. It provides useful example sentences and lists alternative meanings. It also includes a comprehensive library of classical texts arranged under their traditional genre as well as editions of the Kangxi, and the early Shuowen Jiezi dictionaries. In all, a very complete and reliable resource that could become a translator's mainstay. Unfortunately, it now adds English definitions, a retrograde act that rather defeats the purpose of using this dictionary in the first place. One of the functions of using a Chinese/Chinese dictionary is to make you think in context.

Zaixian Xinhua Zidian (在线新华字典)

A comprehensively developed and analytical online version of the best selling pocket Chinese/Chinese dictionary published in many editions over many years by the Commercial Press Shanghai. Searchable by pinyin and six other methods. Multiple meanings (e.g. 14 for 国). Compounds, classical and literary examples, basic English definitions, chengyu and much else. On a level with Han Dian.

Hanyu Cidian (汉语词典)

Part of a complex of reference sites that are congregated under the 911cha.com banner. Chinese/Chinese. Best searched by entering characters in the search box or cut and paste. Produces definitions, associated compounds and literary examples.

Online Dictionaries – Chinese-English

MDBG Dictionary

The MDBG Chinese-English dictionary is very good value, and also Mac-compatible. A flexible, not to say multifaceted resource that appears to be based on CC-Cdict. Search by pinyin or English. Also available as a download.

Encyclopaedia, Glossaries, and Other Useful Sites

Baidu Baike

Baidu's encyclopedia is the best online resource for looking up people and events.

Glossary of Chinese Internet Terms

Part of a website called ChinaSmack. A fairly comprehensive glossary of common, not to say vulgar terms used by Chinese netizens. It demonstrates the flexibility of colloquial Chinese and contains many characters not found in polite usage.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

The idea of a "reverse dictionary" is that you're translating along, and you suddenly realize that there's a perfect word for the thing you're trying to render into English, but just won't come to you. So you go to the Reverse Dictionary, type in some words describing the word you can't remember ("the hard outside of cheese"), and the Reverse Dictionary gives you 100 words, the first of which is "rind".

Apps

Pleco

Pleco is a popular and well-regarded Chinese translation app. It is geared more towards Chinese-English, though can be used the other way around. The free version already comes with a whole bunch of features, or you can use their pretty reasonable upgrade paths to get features like OCR, etc.

Hanping

Very similar to Pleco, and more stable on Android.

Offline Dictionaries and Translation Software

Moedict Desktop

Dictionary created by the Taiwan Ministry of Education, whose extremely extensive Chong Bian Guoyu Cidian Xiudingben (重編國 語辭典修訂本) is the principal source together with dictionaries of the Min and Hakka dialects. Not as extensive as the Han Dian but can be used on your desktop. A useful feature is a built-in mouse-over facility for the Chinese definitions which will save you looking up those characters in the definition that you may not know. Download here.

Wenlin/文林

Wenlin, featuring 10,000 Chinese characters and nearly 200,000 words and phrases, is an extremely flexible C-E dictionary/translation software, with mouse-over facility and the ability to customise your own dictionary.

Hanzim

At $34.95 USD, an affordable alternative to Wenlin

Pera Pera Kun

This mouse-over resource is an add-on to Firefox or Chrome. The quality of mouse-over resources depends upon the incorporated dictionary. Pera Pera uses the CC-Cedict Chinese dictionary which is fairly extensive and includes some chengyu and titles of classical works, though not as complete as other non mouse-over resources. Download for Firefox or find it in the Chrome Web Store.

Cjklib

Geeks will be thrilled to find this Python-based set of databases and lookup functions that allow you to do pretty much anything you'd like to with a Chinese character: discover its stroke order, decompose it into parts, treat it as a radical and find out what characters are made from it, learn how to pronounce in pinyin/Wade-Giles/Korean/Shanghainese… And, of course, do all that backwards.