ZhAssist

ZhAssist is a plugin for AIM which hopes to open up the network to a whole new world of users by assisting in translation and conversation between native speakers, teachers, and learners of English and Chinese, to encourage learning and open dialog, without borders.

It is a plugin for AIMCC compatible AIM clients, though please note it does require Microsoft’s .NET 3.0 in order to take advantage of the great improvements in Chinese font rendering. This is included with all Windows Vista-based systems, and most newer Windows XP machines, and available as a free download here for older XP-based PCs.

 

History:

1.0 - 3/5/2008 ( Download )
First public release, see below for features.

 

Features:

ZhAssist provides a full range of tools to assist learners of both English and Mandarin Chinese, including:

Character Assistant
Offers simple to use “tooltip” style translations for each character in Chinese language messages
Phrase parsing
Advanced custom-made language parsing means many common phrases and idioms can also be translated, the only limit is the quality of the underlying dictionary!
Automated Language Detection
ZhAssist will automatically analyse incoming (or even outgoing) messages and decide whether they contain English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese characters and act accordingly.

Full Chinese/English Dictionary
A convenient dictionary tool is included so you can automatically look up words, from Chinese to English or vice-versa.

System Requirements:

  • AIM6 or plugin-compatible AIM client
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0

Configuration and Use:

The plugin can be configured using a simple settings dialog, though a preferences file is also available:

  1. Download and install the plugin
  2. Open or restart AIM
  3. Configure preferences if necessary (AIM -> Edit -> Settings -> Plugins -> ZhAssist)
  4. Enjoy!

ZhAssist will now automatically appear whenever messages of the selected types are processed, and show the ‘word converstion’ window, which also has links to the dictionary, and to manually enter text you wish to use Character Assist on.

Dictionary:

You can access the dictionary at any time, by either clicking on the icons in the “Incoming Messages” list, or in any buddy window, clicking on “Actions -> Open Dictionary”

The dictionary can be used in 3 simple steps:

  1. Select a type of input to search by:
  2. Start typing the phrase you’d like to find:
  3. Select the word from the list below:

You may use the dictionary to search by Simplified or Traditional Characters, pinyin (Chinese phonetics in latin characters), key index, or English.

Preferences:

The plugin uses the following preferences, registered as local with the AIM client:

aimcc.plugins.zhassist.english.incoming
(Boolean)Whether or not to assist with incoming IMs containing English
aimcc.plugins.zhassist.english.outgoing
(Boolean)Whether or not to assist with outgoing IMs containing English
aimcc.plugins.zhassist.chinese.incoming
(Boolean)Whether or not to assist with incoming IMs containing Chinese
aimcc.plugins.zhassist.chinese.outgoing
(Boolean)Whether or not to assist with incoming IMs containing Chinese
aimcc.plugins.zhassist.maxmessages
(Integer)Number of messages to keep on the list

FAQ:

What does the name mean?
ZHong-wen (Chinese) ASSISTant? I’d like to think it sounds something like “j’assist” also, which is perhaps not real French but sounds nice, in its own funny way.
Why doesn’t it support (feature)?
I hope ZhAssist has a pretty good set of features for most people already but as with any first release there’s bound to be something left out, as always, just leave a comment! All requests and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Why is it so slow?
ZhAssist can take a little time to load when it first starts; this is when it loads up the dictionary and processes it so it is ready for lookups. Usually this is covered by AIM itself taking some time to connect to the server (It tries to load in the background then), but sometimes it can be a little noticeable if it misses that window.
What about after it’s loaded?
Even after loading, ZhAssist is not a ’super-light’ program, I admit. The dictionaries and language processing involved mean that it does take some computing ‘grunt’ to run, however the same can be said about even the standard AIM client these days.
As a result any PC which runs AIM or a modern operating system well can generally cope with ZhAssist without issue. It’s been tested and found to run smoothly on almost anything with 512MB of RAM or more, so that might be a rough guide of what to expect.
All of that said, there’s always room for more optimization, so keep an eye on our news pages and check back for updates regularly!

Details:

This plugin was developed in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

It requires .NET 3.0 and runs on Windows-based platforms; no guarantee or warranty is provided whatsoever, but it has been tested and is known to operate under Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista SP1 (32-bit and 64-bit)