spellcheck should recognize the language

[ratcreature]

Title:
spellcheck should recognize the language

Area:
entries, comments

Summary:
The site's spellcheck should be smarter. It should make a best guess of what language it likely is from the text entered, and apply the right kind of dictionary.

Description:
I know some browsers have a spellcheck of their own, but I always use the site's spellchecker. Only it is not as smart as a spellcheck should be. Usually I type English comments, and that's mostly fine (though the dictionary could use some upgrade too), but today I hit spellcheck as I always do automatically, but happened to have typed a German comment.

The output was a ridiculous, annoying wall of red. But computers these days are not so bad at recognizing common languages (at least if I let that google translator guess on a language bit rather than choosing, it seems to guess sensibly and the translations actually have gotten less ridiculous than a few years ago too), so why couldn't the DW spellchecker see that the comment clearly wasn't English, recognize the language, and pick the correct dictionary automatically?

I don't know how much effort it would be technically to get text based language recognition, and I wouldn't want the dictionary be chosen dumbly based on location settings or language settings in the browser, because then I might get the red wall for English comments and that would be worse. But a spellchecker would be much more convenient if it was smarter and did things it is supposed to do automatically.

I don't see any downsides, because if the language recognition should fail for some languages, you are not worse of than now, as I assume then it would just default to English as the site language.

Poll #4880 spellcheck should recognize the language

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 54

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
24 (44.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
4 (7.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
4 (7.4%)

(I have no opinion)
22 (40.7%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[travelingmonkey]

Personally, I don't like the detect language thing, and it only "detects" by pulling key words (if you remove specific words from things, it'll change its guess, even though the rest is the same). I think the better option is to simply choose to tell it which dictionary you want to use. Firefox has this ability, hence why I never use dictionaries specific to particular sites.

[ratcreature]

If you prefer browser spellcheck it wouldn't impact you either way, but I don't see why a functionality that is there shouldn't work well for those of us who do use it. I have never had a huge problem with the auto-detection. I find it inconvenient to have to select a language from a long list with all available, especially if you switch often and have to choose again and again.

[axiom_of_stripe]

I'd like this if there were a way to override it if it guessed wrong.

[azurelunatic]

Something like: Language autodetected: English (and that's a dropdown list, so you can change it, similar to Google translate)?

[axiom_of_stripe]

Yes, exactly!

[zeborah]

I like this!

(My own experience is that it's annoying to be told that I've misspelled "colour" when no, actually, I've spelled it exactly as I've always been taught. So if it could manage to autodetect British vs USan English that'd be awesome. But having everything underlined would be even more annoying so seems the main priority.)

[msilverstar]

Probably better all around if it's easy to set the language, maybe even a dialog box question the first time the user checks the spelling.

[ratcreature]

But it would be useless for me to set it to German. I want English spellcheck most of the time, just sometimes I want German.

[azurelunatic]

My head, working sideways as usual, has gone off on a tangent about assorted loan-words and other instances of primarily speaking in one language but having words from others sprinkled throughout, and has hit on the (likely search-expensive) concept of looking twice at the misspelled words, seeing if they are joined by punctuation to something around them to make a complete word (like words with apostrophes, which do not get parsed correctly in this spellchecker), and then looking through other dictionaries to see if the word that is misspelled in the primary language of the thing is actually a word in another language, then flagging it (in a separate section, or with different markings, to make it clear that it wasn't flagged as a misspelling) so that in case it was a misspelling instead of a deliberate word from another language, that it would be not just ignored. The language would be identified. If it is a word in another language that looks like a typical misspelling of a word in the primary language, both spellcheck suggestions and whatever stuff that's associated with word-in-another-language should be offered.

For bonus shiny, there might be a link to the definition in the other language, and a list of suggested translations into the primary language. That might be useful in the case I've seen every now and then, where someone's talking in one of their non-primary languages, and the word for what they're thinking about in the language they're talking isn't coming to mind readily, but they know the word they're thinking of in a different language. With a tool like that (which is probably more of a language-focused-company type tool, a little beyond Dreamwidth's scope) the word in the language they're talking in that they knew they were looking for might be offered, leading to less headpounding when communicating.

[ratcreature]

Uh... that sounds really complicated? Also I'm not sure this would be helpful. For example words that are essentially the same but with a slight spelling difference are some that I mistype quite often across languages, case in point I forget to type the C in SCH because in English it is SH for the same sound, so I end up typing English when I should have typed Englisch (in German) or vice versa.

[azurelunatic]

Like zeborah, it really annoys me when a spellchecker tells me that a valid word in another language is misspelled when it is a word and I meant to use that word. On the other hand, in situations like you describe, you want to be told when you've used a word from the wrong language.

So what I was trying to describe up there was a sort of compromise between the two: a spellchecker that would tell you when you've used a word in a language that didn't match the main body of text you were writing in, but also wouldn't call it misspelled. It would merely label it as in another language, and let you determine whether it was a misspelling or deliberate.