PocketNow’s recent video praising Microsoft’s Transcriber has reminded me to ventilate on an issue I personally have with transcriber on my ipaq rx4240. Before we get started, please allow me to mention that I live in Austria, a country where German is the national language spoken.
Seeing that almost all Austrians speak German to at least some extent, the decision to release PocketPC devices with a German ROM is sane and understandable. The inclusion of a German Transcriber dictionary also makes sense.
However, this is where the situation starts to get hairy: English versions of the devices are not sold. As Transcriber relies heavily on its word/phrase database, using it to enter text in a “foreign” language is almost impossible.
Imagine German use4rs getting an English email and wanting to reply in English – you will quickly realize that this issue affects everybody who speaks two languages (aka 50% or more of the world).
The dictionaries used by Transcriber can theoretically be exchanged easily – but Microsoft firmly refuses to let end users download additional dictionaries for their devices. Don’t ask me why this isn’t possible: companies wanting to steal the dictionaries can always afford to purchase a bunch of used PocketPC devices off ebay.
On the other hand, users wanting to enter text in a foreign language via Transcriber find themselves sitting in the rain. The reason why people buy smartphones is to reduce the amount of devices they have to carry – carrying one English and one German PocketPC sort of defeats the entire concept.
IMHO, Microsoft must release language packs to customers ASAP. The current situation is one of the reasons why I largely abandoned my rx4240 in daily use…entering text on it without Transcriber simply was no fun.
Do you have any ideas?
P.S. If Microsoft worries about database theft: one can alwass add in a few bogus words that can be sued to check competitor’s dictionaries…
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You could ask the boys at xda-developers, perhaps they know a way to install foreign dictionaries.
But I think that Windows Mobile supports only one dictionary at a time, so you won’t be able to use the German dictionary.
Alex
Hi Alex,
thank you so much – this definitely is an idea!
All the best
Tam Hanna
I feel for you. I’ve been trying to get support for Transcriber for the last two years, and zilch! I use the shorthand feature extensively, and have built up considerable lists of shorthand notations, which repeatedly get wiped out with every hard reset, and needs to be rebuilt from scratch each time. There seems to be no way to save or export these shorthand notations for future restores.
Anyone have any idea where these elusive lists are saved, or how we can back them up?
Hi Sofia,
I am very sorry, but I gave up on Transcriber…
All the best
Tam Hanna
I have good news and bad news. Being a Pole I have no problem whatsoever with English, Spanish, Czech and numerous other languages.
However, this cannot be said of my Polish-branded Samsung i900 Omnia. The Polish T9 dictionary for text messages works like a charm. However, it seems they installed… an English dictionary somewhere deep in the transcriber. Which means that the entire ROM is in Polish, but the transcriber only works for English texts.
Now the good news is that apparently there is a way to switch the language. We only don’t know how to do it.
Cheers
Hi,
thank you so much for talking back.
IMHO, it all comes down to one thing: can we change this file or not.
All the best
Tam Hanna