Maybe the world needs a little foreign-language help from its personal computer. At least that is what Accent Software International Ltd, a small Israeli company, is hoping. According to the Wall Street Journal, it has just released Accent, a multi-lingual word processor for computers running Microsoft’s Windows software. It enables the user to write in the alphabets of 30 mostly European languages, including Roman, French, Spanish, Greek and Russian. An add-on module for Arabic and Hebrew will be ready soon and a Japanese one is promised for early 1995, with Cantonese, Mandarin and Hindi under development. This $300 product is designed to enable people who already know a foreign language to create documents in that tongue – or in several at once. Accent has a limited translator built in, but that is not its main function. It features a language menu with flags and country names. When one is chosen, Accent automatically reconfigures the keyboard with the standard keystrokes and layout of the keyboards of the desired country. Then, using a keyboard guide on screen, Accent enables the users to produce all the characters and punctuation marks each language requires, but are either missing from standard English word processors or take a lot of work to enter. The standard find-and-replace function works in any language. Accent’s menus, dialogue boxes and help screens can be changed so they appear in any of French, Spanish, Italian, English, German, Russian, Portuguese and Finnish. Although not a full-blown translation tool, Accent does include a translation utility from Berlitz that handles 12,000 common words in each English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. If a word is typed in in one language, its equivalent in the other four languages can be displayed. It also has most of the core features of standard Windows word processors, including a tool bar full of icons. Accent also enables the creation of tables and the insertion of graphics into text files and can import files created in other widely-used programs and export files in other programs’ formats. But Accent takes up over 20Mb of space on the hard disk if every feature is installed and runs more slowly in the minimum 4Mb of memory it requires. It ran on a Compaq Computer Corp 80486 machine, but crashed on Pentium-based Dell Computer Corp box whenever the word-counting feature was used and sometimes when a file was exported, the writer reports. Even the spell-checker seemed to crash often when multiple large programs were running on the Pentium while Accent was in use. The company says it is currently checking into these glitches.
