A Polyglot Wordprocessor

Israeli software house Accent Software International, known locally in Israel as Kivun Software, has introduced a new wordprocessing package targetted at users with exotic multilingual requirements. The first version of the package, called Accent, contains spellcheckers and hyphenation for thirteen national languages and thesauri for nine. It also includes TrueType Cyrillic and Greek fonts for viewing and printing Russian and Greek. The package allows you to define the language of a text (or block of text), for which the appropriate language modules are automatically activated, if available. You can also switch the language of the program’s interface to one of eight languages (including Russian) through a pull,down menu. A handy keyboard mapping utility is included but it only works with Accent.
    While admirable in breadth, the selection of language modules which are included in the package are rather arbitrary, hardly reflecting any clear sociolinguistic strategy. Finnish spellchecking is available but not Swedish. “South African English” is one of the thirty national languages that Accent knows but not Afrikaans. (The utility of solely being able to identify a text as “South African English” remains unclear to us). Oddly enough, considering its origins, this version of Accent does not support Hebrew, but the company promises more languages to come, including Arabic and others as well. The developers at Accent Software localized Windows for Hebrew and Arabic, and Accent reveals that this group knows how to program for Windows; it doesn’t suffer from the performance problems that you usually associate with new Windows packages. On the other hand, for a wordprocessing package, Accent is not very ambitious. Its feature set is decidedly modest, making it unsuitable for heavy-duty document crunching. Accent is bundled with Berlitz Interpreter, a mediocre multilingual dictionary package licenced from Microlytics. A further major limitation of Accent is that it is not based on Unicode but uses its own internal character encoding scheme.

Five or six years ago, there was a wide variety of PC wordprocessing packages on the market — remember Xywrite, WordStar, VolksWriter, PC,Write, Q&A, MultiMate, DisplayWrite? — but the gradual move to Windows seems to have consolidated market share in the hands of Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Lotus. Is there any point in bringing a new Windows wordprocessing package on the market at this stage of the game? Accent’s president Robert Rosenschein believes there is. The personal computer industry has become so vast that there are small niche markets from which a software company like his own can survive and prosper. “There are twenty’two million people in America for whom English is not their native tongue,” Rosenschein points out. Accent has something to offer people living outside of their native countries who might want to be able to wordprocess on a casual basis in their mother tongue. In addition, in Northern Europe, where Accent has started promoting its package, Rosenschein believes the company can score with people who regularly have to deal with a variety of languages. True, companies like Microsoft and WordPerfect offer language modules for all the major European languages and others as well, but Accent bundles a lot of language modules in one package, making the US$299 Accent package a more cost,effective route to multilingual wordpro’ cessing. One factor in Accent’s favor is that not all language modules for the mainstream packages are distributed in all countries. Moreover, localized versions can be difficult to obtain outside of their respective national language areas.

While Accent Software’s first consumer product is a wordprocessing package, Rosenschein ultimately sees the greatest potential in developing add,on packages for the Big Three. He cites information retrieval tools, multilingual writing aids, and trans’ lation tools as the kind of complementary products his company would like to offer. It is a sensible approach and you wonder why Accent did not adopt it in the first place. But if Accent does want to pursue this avenue, it will have to move quickly and be exceedingly innovative. The major develop’ers, locked in a fierce battle for market share, are feverishly studying this area for yet more potential features to enhance their already bloated products. There are now a number of signs that multilingual writing aids and more linguistically sophisticated functions will be among the things which these companies will soon be building into or bundling with their packages, particulary with an eye to the still rapidly growing markets outside of the us. (Note that Microsoft already bundles English and French spellcheckers, hyphenation, and thesauri with the German edition of Word.) You can be sure the OEM suppliers of the major players will be responding in kind. Rosenschein, who has a degree in computational linguistics from MIT, points out that there is also room for better quality linguistic functions in commercial software, such as better hyphenation for Germanic languages, for example, and in this respect, he is quite right. However, he admits that Accent Software does not have a team of linguists developing the necessary core NLP technology, so presumably it will have to come from elsewhere.

Accent Software International, PO Box 53063, Jernsalem, Israel; Tel: +972 279 3723, Fax: +972 279 3731