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Far Eastern versions of Microsoft Windows have a broad user base. But how good are they as an operating basis for multilingual work? At last, in the fall of 1994, some interesting programs for such work have appeared for PCs running MS Windows. This is a short review of their usefulness for practical purposes.
(This report forms part of the Electronic Bodhidharma No. 4. For additional evaluations of Windows vs Mac-OS see Urs App's report From the Multilingual Battlefront in the same issue.)
Microsoft's view of the world resembles the one set forth in the Daodejing:
Though they may gaze across at a neighboring state,
and hear the sounds of its dogs and chickens,
The people will never travel back and forth,
till they die of old age.
(from Victor H. Mair [tr.], Tao Te Ching, The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way, New York 1990, p 39).
Microsoft sees the world as a number of separate countries that each has its own language and script. Microsoft is thus happy to sell you as many versions of their product as you use languages -- but never expect to be able to exchange more than plain old ASCII between these localized versions. This has turned out be good for Microsoft's sales record, but it certainly has not produced the products I would like to see. Microsoft-style globalization thus signifies multiple localization along the lines of the old maxim of the Roman empire: divide et impera -- chop it up and rule [the world] -- which served the Romans well until the world got too big for them to swallow.
The English version of Word for Windows 6 (from now on simply WinWord) made a version jump from 2 to 6, which, though inflated, still somehow reflects the increase in usability (yet if they continue like this, I will probably have to wait at least until version 254 to get something I really like). The East Asian versions, on the other hand, made their jump from 1.2 to 5 and then later to the current 6. The distance between version 5 (which felt like riding a bicycle on a freeway) and 6 (which starts getting usable) is not reflected in the distance of the version numbers. If you have version 5 of Chinese or Japanese WinWord, you should take a look at the new version, even if you did not like the old one.
Having said all this, I must admit that WinWord6 is by far the most useful word processing program running on Windows that handles Kanji. Internally, it works completely in a two-byte mode, which means that it is now possible without pain to have diacritics and Kanji on the screen without doing a lot of unnecessary and weird formatting. Once you have the characters in your document as you need them, they stay there and do not get garbled the next time you change the font. To support this, one has three choices in the select-font dialog:
In most cases this will work as you expect and you don't have to bother, but it gives you the chance of having a different font for the diacritics than for the base text. Of course you can set up styles that automate this for you.
One disadvantage of this approach is that WinWord6 does not let you change some characters from their interpretation as Kanji to roman characters or vice versa. As this is sometimes necessary, especially if you have files created with an English version that do contain Kanji (this applies only to the Chinese version, as Japanese Windows refused to run English Word6!), I wrote a little macro to make this possible, it is part of my Kanjitools for Winword macro collection included on the ZenBase CD1.
The problem gets more severe if you installed a keyboard driver for a language other than English: If I type in the Chinese version with my German keyboard driver installed, I get gobbledygook every time I try to enter an umlaut: WinWord thinks it gets a Kanji and waits for the next character, and once it does it transforms both into a weird and unwanted Kanji. The only workaround I found is to use the English keyboard and either get along with WinWord's own internal key assignments for diacritic characters (be careful not to break your fingers when trying to press three keys at once), or to define your own. Once again, this applies only to the Chinese version, as the Japanese version, truly reflecting the cultural pattern of the target market, gives you only the choice between a Japanese driver and one for US-English. The Chinese version, by contrast, gives you as many as 22 keyboard layouts to select from.
The reader might wonder why I find the East Asian versions of WinWord6 useful at all; so I will give a small list of the strengths as well. I will only mention those special to the East Asian versions, as information about the English version is abundant.
I hate to say so, but competitors will have to work hard to take up Microsoft's challenge.
Japanese Windows 3.1 has really taken off during the last year; so some of the most popular English software packages have been made available in localized versions. No attempt to list or evaluate them is made here. At the same time, some useful shareware and freeware programs became also available.
Hidemaru is an editor designed mainly for programming, but it can be well used to work with any single-font plain text file. It is a shareware program whose author would like to have a payment of 4000 Yen from permanent users. The program comes with a little tool that allows you to create an English version from the Japanese binary (which goes by the name Maruo.
The most useful feature of Hidemaru for my purpose is its built in grep function which lets one perform a search over a group of files or even whole directory trees. You can simply highlight what you want to look for, click on the grep command, and the search gets under way. The result is displayed in a new window where the matches show up in what Hidemaru calls a "tag file". This means that you can go to any diplayed line in this result window, click on the tag icon, and it will open the original text file for you at the location of the match. This is very useful for studying the occurence in its context.
Hidemaru for Windows is available (and supported) on the Japanese network Nifty-Serve,but it has recently also appeared on the Internet. The latest version at the time of this writing is included in the ZenBase CD 1.
Jim Breen (jwb@rdt.monash.edu) is coordinating the EDICT project, an on-line Japanese-English dictionary that has grown well beyond 100.000 entries. He has also developed two little freeware utilities that let you explore this dictionary and its sister file, the Kanji dictionary KANJIDIC.
These programs, as well as ports of JDIC to the Macintosh, X-Windows, and Windows, are available for free by anonymous ftp at ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au//pub/nihongo. A Japanese-German on-line dictionary, Stephen Chung's JWP (freeware Japanese Wordprocessor) and lots of other useful information is also available at the same site.