Re: [9fans] input methods for non-ascii languages

[okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp]

> Some years back I saw a grammar based editor at Sony.
> It allowed you to type a sentence in romaji and it would display
> a romaji/kanji/kana representation of the sentence at the bottom
> of the screen.  Since it 'understood' the sentence, by the time
> you got to the end of the sentence, it had a pretty high probability
> of having it right.  You could then tab over to any word and cycle
> through hiragana, katakana, romaji and the possible kanji equivs.
> Of course, as you fixed each word, it could be changing all of the
> unfixed part to match.  I'ld hate to think how much code was
> behind it.

I don't believe it got any acceptance from well skilled Japanese writers.
The strategy for translating Kana/Romaji input to Kanji may have
two ways, the first for Japanese beginners, where I don't mean them
as foreigners, and the other for well educated Japanese writers.
For the first writer, automatic translation would be helpful, however,
for the latter, it would be a deeply annoying thing.   I'm using ktrans for
everyday mail writings and fairy longer documents without any problem.
I added many words though.

In the ktrans, I know, we have no proper nouns, such as names of
humans or places etc. though.

Kenji