English = English(US)?

Mike — Sun, 01 May 2005 05:50:00 GMT

All over the microsoft.com site I see confused, misrepresented directives for English language versions of Microsoft products : "must be running English(US)".

For example, Windows XP Powertoys: "PowerToys will only work with US-English regional settings." Which regional settings? All of them, one of them? What would happen if one or more were set to English(UK) or some other English locale? Nothing I suspect, but there is a terrible confusion over locale vs location vs language.

The Windowsmedia Player v10 readme says: If you reside in another country or region [to English(US)], we recommend that you wait for the version of Windows Media Player 10 for your country or region to be released before installing. Here's news: there are no versions of Windowsmedia Player localized for English locales outside of the United States.

Even Microsoft Office is not exempt from this foolishness; many downloads are said to be for English(US) only. Here's one pulled up at random for a Word 2000 French Speller update, which is titled French Proofing Tools Update for English (US, Canada) Office 2000 even though the update applies to all English language Office installs.

Bundling of Proofing Tools

Mike — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:23:00 GMT

Michael Kaplan blogged on this subject.

It's very true that the costs of producing any of the language tools can vary enormously from one language to the next. In general, I expect that the smaller the language-base, the greater the cost. This is due to there being less choice resources available to choose from in terms of say lexical resources, voice or handwriting samples and computational linguists. Frankly, if you have a population under about 10 million, how many people do you really have devoted to collecting and analyzing the necessary data for creation of these tools?

[Digression]
In smaller or less-developed countries, the pattern is for interested parties: government, educational and media organizations to pool such resources to create a standard set of spell-checking, thesaurus or possibly voice-recognition tools. They can then tailor them to different APIs for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or other platforms.

There are also some specialist companies who deal with the unique issues of low population language bases or even creole populations. I am sure that some of these are done as a labour of love by modern-day Samuel Johnsons.

For the record, there is not just a single spell-checker for Office and multiple "dictionaries" for each language. Each language has a unique spell-checker (and grammar-checker and thesaurus and hyphenation and ...) DLL that comes paired with equally unique "LEX" files which store linguistic data. There is not even a single "LEX" format: it's really just a Microsoft convention for naming the resource files that accompany the checker-engine DLLs. And since Microsoft ships DLL/LEX sets produced by many other companies, the LEX format will vary according to the imagination and computational skills of each of these companies.
[/Digression]

Nonetheless there are definitely issues with making even the Proofing Tool sets available to the market. Each version of Microsoft Office sees a new version of the PT CD released. The versions of Office and the PT CD must match at installation time but you can subsequently upgrade Office and the older PT elements will still operate. Unfortunately, older versions of the PT CD generally disappear from warehouses long before their product lifetime has expired, and even the Microsoft online store struggles to keep them in stock. For several years I had to send an email to a senior member of the Microsoft Word team to ask them to prompt distributors to keep these items in stock. I hope that Microsoft can figure a way to make these tools available over the web.

Thin Ice : Language and Proofing Tools

English = English(US)?

Bundling of Proofing Tools