in his answer to a query concerning learning of CL at the recent REACH forum, PM Lee mentioned two translation tools that can be useful. one is google translate (which i guess i need not mention), and the other is perapera-kun, which works as a firefox add-on. the translations are based on the open source Chinese-English dictionary, CC-CEDICT. i have downloaded, installed and tried it myself, am impressed by the capability of the ability to recognise word and phrase （字词分辨）. there are still room for improvements for some translations but as of what it is now, it definitely minimise the need for one to switch to another dictionary software, or to flip a physical desktop dictionary. of cos, learners might start complaining the ‘confusion’ caused by too many definitions given at one glance, but isn’t this a problem of most dictionaries all along? advancement of technologies will one day help us resolve this issue i believe (:
and in case you’ll like to hear PM’s words: