When I'm translating for work my preferred Chinese/English dictionary is the one put out by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press because instead of just being a C->E dictionary it's a C->C->E dictionary.

They started with a normal Chinese dictionary (Chinese words and Chinese definitions) and then translated the _whole_ thing. Everything from which part of grammar to example sentences...

Obviously Skritter can't just copy from a dictionary like that (copyright and it being a paper version are but two of the reasons which come to mind) but is there any way to have more complete definitions for each word?

Instead of

水 : Water

something more like

水 [shuǐ]

1. 名 无色、无臭、无味的液体。在标准大气压下，冰点0℃，沸点100℃。

Noun : A colorless, odorless, flavorless liquid. At normal pressure or below it has a freezing temperature of 0 Celsius and a boiling temperature of 100 Celsius.

plus the other 6 dictionary definitions given...

Seeing as I know what water is, I don't see how having a two page definition is efficient when trying to memorize thousands of words and characters.

From the word pop-up you can quickly reference winded definitions from your dictionary of choice, and they might even add your favorite if it's not on there already.

That being said, please update and share improved definitions when appropriate. I'm using Chinese definitions where most are nonexistent and many need revision.

Yeah, since our Chinese-Chinese and Japanese-Japanese definitions are so lacking at this moment, it'd be great if you could submit better ones--even if they're long, they'll beat the somewhat machine-mauled ones we have now. (I tried for a long time to get a usable import of Chinese-Chinese definitions, but nothing was workable except the Chinese Wiktionary, and that turned out to have far fewer usable definitions than its statistics had suggested.) I've given up on getting a freely usable Chinese-Chinese corpus at this point, so it'll have to be up to users to help make those definitions as they themselves need them.

This answers a question I sent Skritter about using another outside dictionary. My question about letting users update the database directly remains...

mprobertson, I just sent you an email; hopefully it answers your other question.