quinta-feira, 27 de março de 2008

Using a macintosh to go multilingual

G'day mate!!
Sorry for the Australian greeting, which I happened to hear in "Ravenshoe" when I visited Australia in 2003 even though I hear that this isn't used often.
After having studied Russian, Korean, Chinese, French, Italian and having restarted studying Polish, Finnish and Swedish there's something that always comes to my mind: How am I supposed to write in all of these languages that use some tricky letters?
Well, after I bought my new Macintosh with Leopard installed my problems are over because I can find fonts for all the aforesaid languages and there's something COOL about writing in traditional Chinese (繁体字), Korean and Russian , which required one to learn a different keyboard setting in order to write in the Panther OS days. In the case of the traditional Chinese, one had to know the so called POMOFOin order to write anything.
Now I can write stuff just like I type to write in English or other language that uses an alphabet.
Let me give you some examples writing my name using my name JULIO.
Simplified Chinese (Zhulio):朱礼欧
Traditional Chinese (Zhulio): 朱禮歐
Russian: йулио(If I type exactly JULIO) but the correct would be жулио
Korean: 주료
Japanese: ジュリオ
Hebrew: חוליו,which would be cool if my name were pronounced like in Spanish but since I'm Julio (joo lee oh) גיוליו would sound better.
Greek: ιθλιο but this is somewhat different in my opinion. I guess ιονλιο would sound better...
If I knew how to use Arabic and the Devanagari alphabet I could also try to write my name in Arabic and Hindi but I'd better not.

After struggling with fonts installation and crazy keyboard settings I decided to use the MAC for multilingual writing and study. I wonder how everybody is doing to write.

Cheers!!

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