gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials » foreign language http://www.ghacks.net A technology news blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Sat, 11 Feb 2012 09:52:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Zombie Keys, Write Foreign Language Special Characters In Firefox, Thunderbirdhttp://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/03/zombie-keys-write-foreign-language-special-characters-in-firefox-thunderbird/ http://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/03/zombie-keys-write-foreign-language-special-characters-in-firefox-thunderbird/#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:51:43 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=38612 Have you ever been in a situation where you had to write a special character that does not exist in your native language? Maybe it was an ü and you were corresponding with Herr Müller from Germany, or Søren from Denmark. Many European countries have special characters in their languages that others do not have. That’s a problem as it is then not that easy to write a character unique to that language in Firefox or Thunderbird.

One of the easiest options is to copy and paste whenever possible. While it is not possible to press a key to write the character, copy and paste works fine and the character will show up in the interface.

Another option is to switch the keyboard language interface, but that’s really only practical if you are writing exclusively in that language for a period of time, and not that useful if you only need a few characters here and there.

And then there are ALT characters which can be added to documents by pressing the ALT key on the keyboard and entering a number from the numpad of the keyboard. Problem here is that you need to know the number to use it.

Zombie Keys for Firefox and Thunderbird offers an elegant alternative. The add-on adds a number of keyboard shortcuts to the program it is installed in. These shortcuts are used to write the foreign language special characters. Shortcuts have been reduced to a minimum by adding multiple characters to one shortcut. The user basically flips through all available characters of a shortcut.

foreign characters keyboard

Zombie Keys is available both for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client and the Firefox web browser.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2011/01/03/zombie-keys-write-foreign-language-special-characters-in-firefox-thunderbird/feed/ 2 Foreign Language Identifierhttp://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/02/foreign-language-identifier/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/02/foreign-language-identifier/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:25:08 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=10856 Does it happen often to you that you receive correspondence in a language that you cannot identify right away? Or that you stumble upon the most exciting website only to find out that you have no clue what language it is written in? If you are on the Internet you might want to try your luck with translation services like Google Translate. This will only work on the other hand if the language is one of the few supported of the service. But what if it is not? The first step of being able to understand the message is to identify the foreign language it was written in.

One excellent foreign language identifier is Polyglot 3000. The main – and only purpose – of the software program is to identify foreign languages. It does that by analyzing text that gets pasted into its interface. All that the user needs to do is therefor copy a sample of the text into the program interface and hit the F9 key to make the software analyze the text.

The software will display the identified foreign language afterwards giving a percentage value that is defining the recognition accuracy. The program will furthermore rate the recognition rate and display similar languages.

foreign language

Polyglot 3000 is currently supported 474 different languages that it can recognize. The recognition can be narrowed down by only scanning for the most popular languages or only Cyrillic languages. The software program supports both Unicode and ANSI encodings.

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