My oh my, isn’t language wonderful! My first language is NOT English but I have managed to work up some basic business English. Necessary for work and such.

But occasionally I have to write in my home language of Afrikaans. So here I am frantically clickety-clackety away trying to get rid of the red wiggly underlines in my Word document. Seems like between the Spell checker and Autocorrect they consume about 100% of my smart new i5 Lenovo laptop, wrestling control from each other to proof read my obviously senseless typing.

Been on this case for a while … there seems to be no ( =NO ) way the problem can be fixed easily. You either have English and everything happens in English, from your screen prompts and tick boxes and Help and everything, or it is in another (Afrikaans or Spanish or French) language. You can not simply say: By using this .DOT template I can spell check this document.

OK. Fine.

What MS says, officially, is that you can install a language pack (done that) and then you can select a particular piece of text, and spell check it against that language. So you create the document in English, then select all text, then spell check. It works very well.

OK. Fine. So far.

Except for one teensy-weensy-small muck-up: Auto-correct. In order for Word not to screw up your Afrikaans document, you have to TURN OFF AUTOCORRECT across your system, completely. Yeah, that’s right. And when you want to create an English document later and you want that functionality, you must remember to turn it back on. and off. and on. again. etc.

Crazy. And stupid.

So here are just some examples of how stupidly my Afrikaans input gets changed by Word before presenting it to my spell checker … In the blink of an eye

• “advies” is automatically corrected to “advise” and “lief” to “life” (not too bad)
• “dat ons” becomes “da tons”, weird, “ons” is “on” and “dat ek” becomes “date k”
• “probleem” to “problem” is understandable but “persoon” is not a “person”
• “ons nog” makes for a funny “on snog” but “kan aan” to “kana an” isn’t

So those are just a few of the cryptic funnies I have to deal with when I use Microsoft. There MUST be a better way …

Cheers!