How to find a Chinese word?

Off the top of one’s head is ‘a dictionary lookup’, which is completely natural; however, in the real life everything’s looking a bit different.

Unless to speculate on the terms of comparative and theoretical linguistics and turn to the existing practice, one should consider two counterparts:

1. The event when a native speaker uses Chinese language spoken or written; and,
   
2. The event when a non-native speaker uses Chinese language spoken or written.
   

The abyss of difference between the two above gets more real at a closer look than at a glance. The fact is the Chinese language due to its specificity and by definition of some theorists is a sort of matrix, where any kind of narration, question, et cetera are rooted to some notion, or topic, being a core of the communication idea. Under such conditions it doesn’t matter how many words one uses to from his idea.

If we talk about a translator, working with a Chinese text, we have to understand that he is limited by the Chinese and some other language pair mappings, imposing word meanings on the source text; and that’s why he’s forced to put the limits on the source text lexemes to exhaust the latter in order to complete the translation. This is the way a translation from Chinese is compiled, and there are no other options because one has to ‘finalize’ a meaning, or an idea, and thus to ‘decide’ where a notion and the word(s) denoting the notion are bordering with a next word. Besides, this is a prototype of algorithms of syntactic analyzers, relying entirely on the lexeme borders among other things.

A native Chinese speaker (or writer) feels no obligation to put limits on an idea expression in respect to the number of words he may use to convey a notion; the only rule he follows is to stay within a corridor of understanding of his addressee.

Thus, it gets pretty clear what kind of limitations may have any natural language processing tool; and the most important one seems to be a sort of convention, which is depending on the vocabulary size of the computer system and being just a mere advisory to a human doing the real job.