Mac MS Word 98 and Russian

[Kat Tancock]

This isn't true at all. It's only in the last couple years that the big
companies (Microsoft and Apple) have really been supporting languages, but
the support is getting really good, and is constantly improving. For
instance, Mac OS 9 ships with reading and writing support for just about any
fairly common language out there - including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and
Russian. Microsoft also offers support for most languages as of Windows
2000. Office 2000 for PC offers a language proofing tools kit that includes
spell checkers for a plethora of languages, and presumably this is available
for Office 2001 as well.

The most important change that is coming for languages is universal unicode
support. Windows 2000 offers this, as will Mac OS X. As well, all new word
processors will be shipping with unicode support, which should make
translation much easier.

As for giving up programs.. well, the reason we have competition is so that
we have the option to select the best program for our needs. If Word doesn't
work for people, then they should switch to a program that does.

It's not that computers are "notorious" for not supporting languages, they
simply weren't designed for it. When computers were first being
manufactured, no one expected people to be using them like we do.

Kat

> As for giving up on Word altogether becuase "it doesn't support languages
> very well;" well, computersin general  are notorious for not supporting
> languages very well.  When new versions of any software come on line, it's
> almost a given that e software manufacturer will not ask  such important
> qustions as "Will this new version be usable by all the people out there
> who need to have languages other than English?" We have to keep after the
> techies or we'll never have what we need.

--
Kat Tancock
Coordinator
UVic CALL Facility
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/call
tancockk at uvic.ca

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