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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

> And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time.

It is a terrible design flaw, that is primarily due to the fact that a lot of software designers assume that the average person speaks one language; in fact there are more multilingual people than monolingual people in the world (cf first paragraph of [0]).

Ideally, software keyboards would be designed to take that fact into account - a few smart things could be done! But no, a lot of software is designed by upper middle class westerners which tend to only speak a single language, and the designs we have are victims of their creators' biases.

In the meantime, I have 5 different keyboards on my iPhone, and I find texting extremely painful.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism

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I completely agree that as software makers, keyboard makers in particular, we have to be understand how prevalent and important multilingualism is. ASCII and the subsequent long road to Unicode is a fantastic example of this western centric bias.

The Minuum team includes a number of multilingual people; I mix french and english on a daily basis, others on the team speak slavic languages regularly. Similarly being based in Toronto, near the bilingual province of Quebec, our friends and family early user network included many multilingual people.

I think that more than almost any other type of software designers, keyboard makers are acutely aware of the importance and the myriad of issues surrounding multilingual support. We've known since very early on that language support is a major factor that will eventually make or break us.

For us, each new language actually brings a surprising number of exciting new technical challenges. Hopefully we'll be able to gain insights from the process and find those "few smart things" that can be done to get you from 5 keyboards to 1.

Funny you mentioned Québec when you're in Toronto: I wouldn't be surprised if there were more multilingual people in the GTA as there are in all of Québec.

Most Québecois speak both French and English, but I get what you're saying.

Toronto is so multicultural it doesn't make sense to claim proximity to Quebec as a language bonus.

I meant to suggest that between toronto's multiculturalism and Quebec's bilingualism we had a lot of early users who were multilingual. Sorry if that was unclear.

> It is a terrible design flaw, that is primarily due to the fact that a lot of software designers assume that the average person speaks one language;

In countries where people have to deal with two or more system on a daily basis (i.e: any country that is not on ASCII like alphabet) there is no such assumption, but there is still no very good solution for this problem after decades of trying.

I don't think it's laziness or short-sighness that impedes progress. We might need a big breakthrough in some field or disrupting idea to have thing move faster.

I suspect it is more the bias than the technical difficulty. You can you the same techniques used to predict words to predict the language they are in, especially if you limit it to a user-defined set of languages. I would be tempted to try it but I don't speak multiple languages so I would be a terrible test subject.

If think you could experiment with an interface that actually does to solve this problem and does auto detect the language: http://translate.google.com/#auto

Once a language is detected it won't reevaluate the input, so you have to paste whole sentences in it. The implementation really goes above and beyond to guess the input, I think that's what you and other mean by matching several languages at ounce. For instance "J'aime pas la philosophie du 'just do it'" will translate both french and english parts at the same time.

The thing is, 'just do it' is a ready made english sentence, but you could autocorrect it to 'juste doit' or 'jus doit', both of which are valid single words in french. There's no way to know what you really meant on the autocorrection front (we have to assume you made a mistake to suggest something), and you'll need an interface constantly suggesting correction that you'll dismiss 99% of the time. This feels like hell in a popup to me.

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