Grammar checkers + MS Word 6/7 problems

["Peter Ring, PRC" <prc -at- PIP -dot- DKNET -dot- DK>]

On Mon, 8 Jul 1996 01:34:02 -0800 Matt Ion <soundy -at- NEXTLEVEL -dot- COM>
wrote

>    Apparently, MS Word's spelling/grammar checker has not been
>    doing too well in non-english versions.  Specifically is a
>    Reuters story in this past weekend's paper on how the Spanish
>    version of the thesaurus suggests "man-eater" or "savage" as
>    synonyms for "Indian"... or "Aryan," "white," and "civilized," as
>    alternatives for "Western"... or equates "Lesbian" with "pervert"
>    and "depraved person".

>    "Oops."

I would be very surprised if the English grammar checker is very
different in different language editions of a programme. For many
non-English there is no grammar checker in e.g. MS Word 2/6/7. For
Danish I have bought a local grammar checker "Sprogmagisteren",
which is designed for WP, but can be used with any other word
processor, too.

The "errors" you are talking about are in the thesaurus which is
something completely different, and they have nothing to do with
grammar or spelling checkers. The aim of the thesaurus is to help
you finding synonyms or semi-synonyms, i.e. words more or less
covering the same meaning in the same or other contents. Reuters'
journalist has for sure had fun finding these perverted examples, but
if a pervert couldn't remember the word "lesbian" and wrote
"pervert", (s)he could then by means of the thesaurus probably find
the more proper word, e.g., "lesbian" (s)he really wanted to write.

But MS Word 6/7 has a a much more serious problem with some
non-English languages, e.g. Danish, where use of the spelling
checker causes Word to break down completely on certain even quite
common words like "motor". MS knows about the problem (it has an
internal MS problem number) but has found no way (time?) to solve it
yet. For spell checking of Danish, I consequently transfer the text
to my good old MS Word 2.0 and check it there, transfering all
corrections manually (!) to Word 7.0, or I check it with the Danish
grammar checker "Sprogmagisteren" (same manual procedure). I - and
many other people - are looking VERY much forward to an update
package of Word 6/7 solving this *VERY* serious problem!!!

Greetings from Denmark
Peter Ring
PRC - specialist in user friendly manuals and quality measurements on
      manuals.
prc -at- pip -dot- dknet -dot- dk
http://www.pip.dknet.dk/~pip323/index.htm
    - homepage on user friendly instruction manuals with tips for
      instruction manual writers.

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