Re: [A12n-Collab] "Microsoft to launch applications in three Nigerian languages"
Trond Trosterud wrote:
>
> Andrew Cunningham kirjoitti 10. apr. 2008 kello 04.29:
>> interesting for what it doesn't say as much as what it does say.
>> Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo only have input locales in Windows Vista
>
> Well, everything is better than nothing.
>
> My wishlist would have been ordered this way:
>
> 1. input locales
> 2. spellchecker
> 3. GUI translation
> 4. More advanced language tools (grammar checker, thesaurus,
> translation, etc)
You forgot a couple of important steps
Your one becomes my 1a:
1a. input locale
1b. keyboard layouts or IME
1c. fonts (including UI fonts)
1d. font rendering / text layout
Although vista has 1a, 1c and 1d, it is missing 1b
It supports Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, can localise into them, can display
them, but can't type in them.
What i tried to say, but may not have said clearly is that there are
defined input locales for these languages, but NO keyboard layouts.
If the end user has the knowledge and skill you can create a keyboard
layout and assign it to that input locale. Something we're doing here
internally.
Never did she the logic in creating Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo input
locales, but assigning the US English keyboard layout tot hose input
locales by default and not providing keyboard layouts appropriate to the
language
Spell checkers are going to be interesting and possibly input specific
issue.
The Vietnamese experience is an interesting illustration of what will
happen with Yoruba.
Already with Yoruba there are a number of keyboard layouts using
different technologies. each allows you to type in Yoruba, but each
keyboard layout may give you different unicode character sequences for
the same character.
This impacts on spellcheckers.
For instance in Microsoft's proofing tools for Office, there is a
Vietnamese spell checker. its been designed to work with Microsoft's
Vietnamese keyboard layout which produces an odd mix of precomposed and
combining characters.
Microsoft's spellchecker follows this system
People who use a non-microsoft keyboard layout will be typing fully
precomposed characters. Many of the words in the text will appear to the
spell checker as misspelled even if it is correct because it will not
match the character sequences in the spell checker.
Not sure if this has been improved in more recent applications, but has
been a long standing issue. Similar issues will exist for other
diacritic heavy languages.
The Win32 keyboard model isn't overly flexible.
Andrew
--
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
Email: andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au
Alt. email: lang.support+AEA-gmail.com
Ph: +613-8664-7430 Fax:+613-9639-2175
Mob: 0421-450-816
http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/
http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.mylanguage.gov.au/
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~andrewc/
Having problems with message search?
Fill out this form to ensure your group is one of the first to be migrated to the new message search system.
Send Email
