Word 2004: French Canadian spell checker has never heard of ‘Terre-Neuve’

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
September 15th, 2004 • 6:17 am

I realize that Microsoft probably licenses its spell checking software from a third-party — but that’s not really relevant to me as an end user. To me, when Word’s spell checker fails to recognize correct words, it’s a problem with Word. It’s up to Microsoft to deal with the problem by pressuring the third-party in question to fix the problem in the spell checking software licensed from them.

I’ve already mentioned the extremely annoying bug in the French Canadian (and French) spell checker that causes it to flag each and every occurrence of “etc.” as an error, even though it’s a perfectly correct word. It’s made all the more annoying by the fact that you cannot use the “Ignore All” button to skip all occurrences of the word. You actually have to click on the “Ignore” button for each and every occurrence in your document.

Here is another one. Believe it or not, Word’s spell checker for French Canadian does not even know that “Terre-Neuve” is a correct proper noun. (It’s the French name of Newfoundland.) It’s like the US English spell checker not knowing that “California” is a correct proper noun in English!

Grrr.


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