In response to a jumping operation in which a word appearing in an explanatory description read from a Chinese-Japanese dictionary is specified as a jump word, language information on the jump word is read, and the jump word is converted to the corresponding all-purpose character codes by using an all-purpose character code/Chinese-Japanese dictionary local character code conversion table for the language information on the jump word. Further, the all-purpose character codes of the jump word are converted to the corresponding existing local character codes by using an all-purpose character code/existing local character code conversion table for the language information. Jump-enabled destination dictionaries are then extracted based on the language information, a headword matching the jump word is retrieved in a jump destination dictionary selected from the extracted jump-enabled destination dictionaries, and the corresponding explanatory description is then displayed.