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Tango makes a good try at a tough task

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The problem with language is that so many nations speak different ones. The Internet grew up in the United States, where they speak a form of English, the World-Wide Web was the idea of a British physicist in Switzerland. The French have reservations about the whole idea.

Still, nobody is holding a gun to the head of the Internet service providers around the world and demanding English-only content. There is a growing amount of non-Anglo content on the Web, and that is a good thing.

What happens, however, if you read a certain language but do not want your entire computer system to talk to you in it? If, for example, you can read Japanese and Chinese but would prefer your computer spoke to you in English, what would you do? Up to now, one of the best answers was to get a Macintosh. Apple's WorldScript is still the best multilingual option around and enables languages including Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Russian to be put in the system.

Alis is a software firm that wanted to create an Arabic browser and then moved on to supporting other languages. Tango is both a browser and a Web page creator (depending on the version) for the Windows platform. It is especially good at being quite easy to install.

Tango does not touch the system, so you do not have to worry about disturbing the system-level files. This was long a problem for the Mac, different languages required different settings and there were many conflicts at first.

When you first log on to the Alis Web site, it splits into two frames, the one on the left contains a list of global sites in a range of languages. Double-clicking on a site will take you there and the language will be displayed quite nicely.

If, however, you go to a site that is not on the list, Tango will not switch automatically to the target language. As far as I am aware, there is no browser that automatically switches languages.

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