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Spell check multilingual files in Word?
Thread poster: Erin DeBell
Erin DeBell
Erin DeBell  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 23:13
Spanish to English
+ ...
Apr 16, 2013

Good evening:

I am sure there must be an easy solution to this. I work on a lot of multilingual files and I am unable to spell check them since Word gets confused. Is there a workaround to this?

Sometimes my files contain columns. When this is the case, I generally cut out the English column, run a spell check on it, and manually fix any issues in the original document. This method doesn't help me on the other column, which is often bilingual.

I am hap... See more
Good evening:

I am sure there must be an easy solution to this. I work on a lot of multilingual files and I am unable to spell check them since Word gets confused. Is there a workaround to this?

Sometimes my files contain columns. When this is the case, I generally cut out the English column, run a spell check on it, and manually fix any issues in the original document. This method doesn't help me on the other column, which is often bilingual.

I am happy to provide more info and I look forward to hearing about how others tackle this problem.

FYI: I do not currently have a MAC. I am not opposed to using third-party software if needed. I mainly deal with this problem when I do transcriptions with the source language and target language in the same file. Or sometimes, there will be Spanglish.

Thank you in advance! ▲ Collapse
 
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT
Tomás Cano Binder, BA, CT  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 05:13
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
Manually select the language? Apr 16, 2013

In Word you are able to select pieces of text and assign each of them a language for spellchecking etc. In Word 2010 it is something like the Review tab > Language > Set Spelling Language.

If you have tables where one column is in English and the other one in a different language, you can select whole columns and assign them the right languages.

Would this be a solution?
 
esperantisto
esperantisto  Identity Verified
Local time: 07:13
Member (2006)
English to Russian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
Fail to understand Apr 16, 2013

I fail to understand the problem. Whenever you switch the keyboard layout, Word switches the text language accordingly. In any case, select the text you want to spellcheck and assign the required language by clicking on the language selector in the status bar on the bottom of window (at least, in the Windows version of Word, not sure about Mac).
 
PAS
PAS  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:13
Polish to English
+ ...
Assign language to text Apr 16, 2013

AFAIK the autodetect feature only works if you actually write text.
If the text is already there, I don't know of any other way but to mark the portions of the text in the appropriate language and switch the spellcheck language to whatever you need.

Hint - holding the CTRL key when selecting text will let you select non-continuous bits of text.
 


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Spell check multilingual files in Word?






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