| With the rapid development of Intelligence Technology, internet becomes a ubiquitous communication platform and greatly facilitates people's work and study from more and more aspects of life. This platform encourages more and more people from various continents and countries to talk or"type"in English. Thus, the accuracy and proficiency of English command takes on greater and greater importance. It is the very reason why online dictionaries appeared and thrived rapidly.Although online dictionaries have become an indispensable part of daily life, we have limited knowledge about them. How developed are online dictionaries? In which areas do they have unparalleled advantages over human translation? Which website offers the most powerful and efficient online translation? The very purpose of this thesis is to provide answers to such questions.Online translation is a translation system based on machine translation. Most translation systems today are rule-based ones which translate source language to target language in accordance with predefined rules. Machine translation has a history of around 60 years. However, there is still gap between the level of translation ability in developed countries and that of domestic China.There are numerous online dictionaries in China. According to the transportation numbers published on China Website Ranking, the author introduces some of the most popular Chinese-English online dictionaries in domestic China. They are: Google translation tool, Baidu, Dict.cn, iCIBA, CNKI, nciku and dic123. Google and Baidu translation tools assemble resources with its powerful searching capability. Dict.cn and iCIBA are most popular online dictionaries presently. CNKI's sale point is its gigantic paper database with an academic background. nciku boasts its handwriting function. And dic123 is a large dictionary pool and specializes in translation of profession.To gain the latest information on online dictionary, the author carried out a survey to collect feedbacks from online dictionary users. The survey found out the hottest online dictionaries used by people around us together with their merits and defects. The subjects were classified as"English-Major"and"Others". Through comparison and analysis, the author identified preferences of respective user segments. Besides, the survey also gathered some suggestions and expectations from users.The"Experiments"part is divided into parts of"word translation","phrase translation","slang and idiom translation"and lastly"sentence translation"to test several mainstream online dictionaries. It turns out that each website has it own advantages and flaws. In the end, one website stands out as champion with a comprehensive assessment.After the above investigations, the author summarizes the general situation of free Chinese-English online dictionaries in China in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Therefore, readers are provided with a full picture of this online tool.The author winds up the thesis with a conclusion of online dictionary's major limitations and applicable situations, and submitted many suggestions in accordance with the survey result. Though they are not able to replace human translation now, online dictionaries have a dynamic potential market and a promising future.
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