Google Chinese Input - offline English to Chinese

Google knows that China is a huge market. If add in Chinese population outside of China, that is even huge. There is saying you can find China Town in every major city around the globe, well, not all, but most of them. I can even find Chinese Restaurant at somewhere of nowhere in Utah, believe it or not, I did stop by to have dinner in that restaurant, since my friends insisted. :P

Okay, enough of non-sense. I have been using Google Chinese Input as alternative for default Chinese Input from Microsoft. As a known fact, MS's stuffs simply okay only, if you want something better, you have to find another software, hence Google Chinese Input. Since I was grown up in China's PinYin system (Malaysia Chinese Education system uses PinYin system, so as Singapore), I am too used to PinYin system. Google Chinese Input is actually Google PinYin Input System.

To understand PinYin System, read this wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

The most important feature of Google PinYin Input System is that I can key-in only first character of PinYin of the Chinese phrase (usually from 2 to 4 Chinese characters, sometimes more than that), it will show me the right Chinese phrase. This is super fast compare to MS Chinese input.

Google Chinese Input has been there for few years, recently I noticed that Google Chinese Input have released version 3. Actually the latest version was on Jan 2011, boy, I am really outdated. :P Even though the software is not updated so frequent, the dictionary is being updated weekly, if not daily.

What so special about version 3? It included an offline English to Chinese dictionary. That is the dictionary that I mentioned in paragraph above. This is very useful for English educated people that start to learn Chinese or people like me which has been away from Chinese for too long. When you switch on Google Chinese Input, if you press "shift" key once, it will allow you to type in English directly, press "shift" again, it will go back to detect PinYin input. While writing English, it will start translate the English to Chinese.

Even I have problem spell an English word, it will try to suggest the correct answer.

It will also suggests synonym of the English word.

More synonym can be find in another tab.

You can turn this feature off in setting if you find it annoying or no use for you.

Set your preference on how many characters you key-in before Google Chinese Input start to suggest.

To download Google Chinese Input version 3 with English to Chinese Translation:
http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/english/

To download Google Chinese Input version 2, the classic:
http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN/ime/pinyin/

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picture source: google [I don't need to recreate the wheel :P ]