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I use an iBook and would like to be able to type simplified Chinese characters in both Word documents and e-mails. What software do I need? Are there any free applications on the internet or any from Apple? Can I use Chinese characters on MSN Messenger? I'm also looking for software for Chinese to English translation.

Rui Ling

Mid-Levels

Both Apple and Microsoft have long supported Chinese in their operating systems at no extra cost.

If you go to System Preferences on the Mac, you will see an icon on the first row called International. Click on that and you will get a screen with three buttons and a list. The list contains the languages you have chosen to support. The Edit List button allows you to add or subtract to that list. Click on that and add Simplified Chinese. You then need to go to Input Menu and choose and input method.

Most people who want Simplified Chinese prefer Pinyin. It works quite well on the Mac, and will convert characters you type in Pinyin on the fly. There are other choices, so you should be able to find something you can use.

You probably have to exit any applications you are running and restart them if you want them to support Chinese. But you don't need to reboot.

As an experiment, I created an account on MSN Messenger to see if I could create a Chinese message. It worked fine on the Mac.

This is good news, I think, because some of the other instant messaging software does not allow me to write Chinese.

One thing I was unable to check was the ability of my message to be read across platforms. I suspect that won't be a problem, but this is the kind of thing one can never be sure about. You would need to send a Chinese message to somebody on a PC running Windows or Linux to make sure it works.

Machine translation of Chinese has been around for some time, and the results are varied. A lot depends on what you want translated and who you are.

If you are reasonably fluent in both English and Chinese, the results will almost certainly annoy you.

I have a friend who regularly submits large amounts of Chinese text to Systran, a well-known translation company. It is their technology that is used by such companies as Babelfish. He tells me he gets results he can live with.

What that means for him is that he wants to get the gist of a document, and Systran provides him with exactly that. Yes, they can get things dreadfully wrong, but he is interested in the big picture.

He deals with many technical documents, and therefore just wants to get an idea of what is going on. Systran does this for him, he says.

The Babelfish site has plenty of information on this subject at www.babelfish.org/

You can get more information on Systran at http://imagiforce.com/chinese-translation.htm



Translation software  good for big picture rather than fine detail