Mathieu Blondel

La chanson française la plus connue en Chine (du moins, parmi les jeunes de mon âge) est sans nul doute : « Je m’appelle Hélène » (par Hélène, de Hélène et les garçons).

On m’en a parlé à de très nombreuses reprises ! Assez incroyable je dois dire… ! O_O

La première fois qu’une Chinoise m’a demandé si « je connaissais Hélène », j’ai mis un peu de temps à faire le rapprochement et j’ai été bien surpris quand je l’ai entendu chanter : elle connaissait les paroles et les prononçait très bien ! (Je doute qu’elle comprenait ce qu’elle chantait par contre… ;-))

Apparemment les Chinois trouvent que la mélodie est très jolie et que le Français a une jolie sonorité (on me le dit souvent aussi).

J’avais pas trop envie de leur dire que tout le monde l’avait oubliée en France même si, avouons-le, sa série a bercé l’enfance de pas mal d’entre nous… C’est marrant toutes ces stars oubliées en France qui continuent d’avoir du succès en Asie…

A few months ago, I wrote about EPWING dictionaries, a very popular format in Japan. I personally own three commercial dictionaries in this format: Eijiro (English to Japanese), CrownFR (excellent French to Japanese dictionary) and Le Concis JF (Japanese to French).

I wrote a conversion script in order to use them with a dictd server, which means I can now use them with Fantasdic. See for example this screenshot of the excellent CrownFR in Fantasdic:

The script is currently in the Fantasdic CVS and will be shipped with the next release.

Now with those dictionaries and converted stardict dictionaries, I now have very high quality English, French, Chinese and Japanese dictionaries for my daily needs. I am very happy.

The current TODO list for Fantasdic includes:

- Work on a new “matches side pane” which will allow to select and see results in case a query returns many results.

- Add support for Gtk::Print, which will allow to print definitions or export them as PDF.

- Switch from gtk-trayicon to Gtk::StatusIcon, which should bring portability to Windows.

- Add Japanese language specific features such as romaji input and word desinflection through Mecab.

- Close the Nihongo Benkyo project and use nihongobenkyo.org to run a public server with Japanese dictionaries. Include a web interface to query the server.

I updated my gallery of pictures from China. It now features pictures from Dalian (a nice city in the north-east), Nanking (”capital of the south”), Peking (or more precisely from the Forbidden City), Shanghai (the most modern city in China), Suzhou (which is said to be the oriental Venice), Wuxi (where I live) and Yangzhou (hometown of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin).

http://www.mblondel.org/photos/public/Chine/