Using two dictionaries concurrently

[Mauricio]

I often find myself switching between languages in the same document, and even between different versions of the same language (American and British English). If I select the American English dictionary, "honourable" will be flagged as an incorrect spelling. If I choose the British English one, "organization" will be out of bounds. And when I insert a quotation in Spanish, the whole thing will be underlined in shameful red. Is there a way to use two or more dictionaries concurrently?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Yes. But you need to tell Word which dictionary you want to use for
which words. Select your writing in Spanish, then go to Tools | Language
and select Spanish. Click OK (do *not* click default). Word will now
spellcheck only the text you selected in Spanish. Same for English UK.

More information here, with various tips linked on speeding up the
formatting.
http://word.mvps.org/mac/SpellCheck.html#DifferentLanguage

How are you choosing dictionaries now? Word doesn't really have an
option for you to "choose a dictionary" like that.

 

[Mauricio]

Thanks Daiya. I was aware of this, but I was wondering if I could tell word to check the entire text against two dictionaries, and only highlight words that appeared in none. Otherwise it becomes a pain.

 

[MC]

I have the same problem -- in my case with French.

It's just not very practical to Select Language when the text is all
mixed up -- Let's say I'm writing in English about a poem in French, I
could be quoting one line of French in the middle of an English
paragraph. I really would like to be able to simply Spell Check the
document as a whole... without switchign back and forth.

Howevaire... I kind of doubt that's possible, right?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Mauricio and MC--

Can't change the approach--there are ways to minimize the hassle. For
instance, if you set it up right, you could hit control-s when you start
to type in Spanish, and control-e when you go back to typing in English,
and that would be a pretty quick way to apply the right formatting and
get the result you want. The truly bilingual person who doesn't notice
when they start typing in Spanish may still find this annoying, but I'd
imagine it could become pretty automatic for the rest of the people.

Windows Word actually does have automatic language detection--you still
can't tell it to check against two dictionaries, but it will try to
automatically apply the language formatting for you. As with most
instances when Word does things automatically for you, it is not infallible.

 

[John McGhie]

If you create a series of styles, one for each language, and you apply those
styles to the text as you switch language, then yes, you can spell-check the
whole document at once.

Once you have marked each word or phrase or sentence or whatever in the text
with its correct language, Word's spelling checker will switch languages on
the fly, word-by-word if necessary.

It actually *does* load all the dictionaries at once, and uses whichever one
it needs at the current instance.

Cheers

I have the same problem -- in my case with French.

It's just not very practical to Select Language when the text is all
mixed up -- Let's say I'm writing in English about a poem in French, I
could be quoting one line of French in the middle of an English
paragraph. I really would like to be able to simply Spell Check the
document as a whole... without switchign back and forth.

Howevaire... I kind of doubt that's possible, right?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia

 

[MC]

Hmmm... interesting.

Howevaire...

Much of the text I work with is pasted from a document was created by
other people (usually using French as their language default), and most
of the time these are fairly short documents on tight deadlines, so I
can't spend a lot of time retrofitting Styles.

And... can you have two Styles within the same paragraph? Seems you can.
You learn something every day!

 

[MC]

Yes. But you need to tell Word which dictionary you want to use for
which words. Select your writing in Spanish, then go to Tools | Language
and select Spanish. Click OK (do *not* click default). Word will now
spellcheck only the text you selected in Spanish. Same for English UK.

I wonder... Is there a way to access all the words in any given
dictionary -- in my case, the French dictionary -- and Copy/Paste them
*all* into the Custom Dictionary. That way I could spell check words
from two languages using one dictionary.

And if it can't be done within Word, maybe it can be done using a
third-party dictionary.

In theory it should work... no?

 

[CyberTaz]

<snip>

And... can you have two Styles within the same paragraph? Seems you can.
You learn something every day!

<snip>

Any given para can only have *1* _para_ style applied to it at a time, but a
variety of _char_ styles can be applied to various bits of the text within.
It should be noted tht if you get carried away with this it overcomplicates
the doc & could result in an editing nightmare as well as corruption of the
file, but is less likely to do either than if the same formatting variations
were applied directly.

 

[John McGhie]

Generally, this is not practicable. There are too many instances of words
which are correct in one language but an error in another.

In English, there are 29 "flavours". Mac Word's main dictionary carries
three of them side-by-side. Similarly with French, I believe all flavours of
French are carried in the same main dictionary.

However, to be able to state definitively that a word is "wrong", Word must
know which language it is supposed to be in.

It's a good idea not to allow your custom dictionary to get too large. Any
more than about 20,000 words and things will start to slow down a bit, and
Word's memory demands will become fairly substantial.

The main dictionaries are compiled binaries that are optimised for speed and
memory usage. The custom dictionary is simply an ANSI text file. It must
be resident in memory, so the bigger it is, the slower and larger the
result.

Cheers

I wonder... Is there a way to access all the words in any given
dictionary -- in my case, the French dictionary -- and Copy/Paste them
*all* into the Custom Dictionary. That way I could spell check words
from two languages using one dictionary.

And if it can't be done within Word, maybe it can be done using a
third-party dictionary.

In theory it should work... no?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia

 

[Mauricio]

That Word's English dictionary includes the three main flavors doesn't ring true to me. Try typing honor and honour - one of them will be marked as wrong. Same as organization and organisation, center and centre, etc. Unless the three flavors carried in the main dictionary are "American", "New Englander" and "Californian" all those words should be able to go through.

 

[MC]

I intuitively "knew" (not really) that this wouldn't work. Thanks for
taking the time to explain the whys and wherefores.

 

[John McGhie]

Sorry: You need to understand how the Speller actually works.

Depending on your version of Word and its platform, "English USA", "English
UK" and "English AUS" are the three languages.

Word "selects" which "column" of the dictionary to use by the language
marked on each word while it is checking. Words that have no language
marked are spelled with the default language marked for the document.

Only the English US column is fully populated. The other columns are
populated only if the spelling is different in those languages.

The reality is a little more complicated: there is a column for each form of
each word, and again, the other word form columns are populated only if they
vary from American.

This is how they manage to compress the entire English dictionary into a
memory footprint of only 1.1 MB.

Cheers

That Word's English dictionary includes the three main flavors doesn't ring
true to me. Try typing honor and honour - one of them will be marked as wrong.
Same as organization and organisation, center and centre, etc. Unless the
three flavors carried in the main dictionary are "American", "New Englander"
and "Californian" all those words should be able to go through.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia

 

[Mauricio]

OK, but then for all practical purposes they behave like three separate dictionaries. The design saves space, but does not add functionality.

 

[John McGhie]

I think this is getting a bit circular...

1) By having the dictionary "small" it can be memory resident.

2) By having it memory-resident, it can be "fast"

3) By having it fast, it can switch languages word-by-word at better than
800 words a second.

4) Enabling it to switch languages at a prodigious rate enables Word to
spell-check a document in real-time, with as many languages as the user
owns, on a machine the user can afford to own.

I think most would agree that that's quite important "functionality".

Cheers

OK, but then for all practical purposes they behave like three separate
dictionaries. The design saves space, but does not add functionality.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia