Multiple languages?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Beena V Katekar reports: <<I have written a manual and help for Industrial
automation application. This application supports the multiplelanguages. Now
I need to translate the key terminologies to germany(time being). But my key
board doesn't support special alphabets of german/ french, Is there any
software(free downloads) available which let me work on multiple languages,
without affecting default language setting (english) of computer?>>

Depending on how sophisticated your needs are, you may not need to do
anything special. I'm using the U.S. English keyboard setup with Word, and I
can get most _Western_ European accents simply by pressing Control-[accent],
then releasing both keys and typing the letter that needs the accent.
Replace [accent] with ' for an acute accent, ` for a grave, " for umlaut, ^
for circumflex, and so on. Experiment a bit!

If you need to actually type in the other language, Windows and the
Macintosh both let you switch languages, though where you make this change
varies between platforms and versions of the operating system. Sometimes
it's the Keyboard control panel; sometimes it's the Language settings;
sometimes it's the International or Regional settings. In any event, simply
check out all three control panels; one of them will let you select the
language that is being mapped to your keyboard. The only problem is that if
you're a touch typist, you'll have to relearn which keys go with which
accents; my keyboard used to occasionally switch to Canadian French, and it
drove me nuts until I figured out what to do about it. (See next paragraph
for explanation.)

Once you've found the right dialog box, look at the bottom of the screen;
there, you can specify a keystroke (e.g., Alt-Spacebar) that lets you switch
between languages without having to run through the control panels. This is
occasionally a cause for much grief when someone inadvertently uses this
keystroke and suddenly discovers that their keyboard has gone nuts. If you
don't know about this "feature", it can lead to long, unproductive
troubleshooting sessions to discover whether it's time to replace the
keyboard.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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