A Reading Environment for Classical Chinese

Description

This project aims to create a prototype of a reading environment for Classical Chinese in a digital library. The reading environment will offer a collection of Classical Chinese documents, augmented with explanatory information, such as links to lexicon entries, English and modern Chinese translations, and background materials for referenced people, places and organizations; other services such as syntactic analysis, machine translation and cross-language information retrieval are to be added in a later version.The reading environment will be integrated into an existing digital library with a large and heavily used collection of Latin and ancient Greek texts. To be released under a Creative Commons open license, this tool will enrich the learning and teaching of Classical Chinese, facilitate corpus-based research on the language, open up Chinese material for non-Chinese speakers, and promote cross-cultural understanding.