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Babelcarp is a web site that lets you type a tea-related phrase in romanized Chinese, click a button, and see the phrase's translation into English. If you're lucky. There are a lot of things that can go wrong, including the possibility that Babelcarp doesn't (yet) know some or all of the words in the phrase. The other possible reasons for Babelcarp disappointing you are fascinating, but we won't go into them yet.
Even if Babelcarp doesn't know the whole phrase, chances are that it will tell you what part of it means. In the course of defining the whole phrase or parts of it, the Carp might also use romanized Chinese words that are highlighted. These are hyperlinks; click on a link for the definition if you don't recognize it. (You know what a hyperlink is; you're a Web user!)
If the Carp drew a blank on part or all of what you typed, you don't actually have to send me email, because every failure gets logged. Not that I don't enjoy getting mail from Carp users; I do.
But that doesn't solve your immediate problem. First, consider the possibility that what you typed is misspelled. Then: is it really about Chinese tea? Darjeeling isn't Chinese. Ping Wei Pian is a Chinese herb. Let's not get hung up on whether Chinese herbal decoctions are or aren't teas, but note well that the Carp deals with Camellia sinensis only, leaving Chinese medicine to those fish who actually know something about it.
There's an extremely common case where you type, say, four romanized Chinese syllables and the Carp blanks on the first couple but defines the rest. Let's make up an example: Qiao Xuo Hong Cha, which to the best of my knowledge doesn't actually exist. The Carp'll tell you what Hong Cha is, but what's Qiao Xuo? Well, more often that not in this situation the first couple of words constitute the place name associated with a tea. There are countless villages in China whose names begin the names of teas, and the Carp will never learn them all.
I love Chinese teas and was frustrated by not understanding the terminology. I'd seen a number of web sites offering valuable knowledge on Chinese tea, but:
I'm a programmer and it didn't seem like such a big job to write thecode for the Chinese tea terminology equivalent of the redoubtable Babelfish, so I went and tried it.
What's it made of? (programmers only)
Babelcarp is basically a small Perl program and a lot of data. The program uses the CGI module, thereby winning points for the virtue of laziness.
The data in its textual form, that is, the form in which it gets edited by me, is just a series of pairs: phrase, definition, phrase, definition, ...
With hundreds of terms to define, the data in the form in which the program searches it is now a tied hash backed by the Berkeley Database Manager.
The search algorithm is basically to try to find the whole phrase; failing that it backtracks to find subphrases as big as possible.
The search is done once to define the phrase. Then the each definition gets searched for Chinese tea subphrases to hyperlink as Babelcarp invocations.
Where else can I go to find out more?