## Spell checker

- Introduction

- Spell checker options

- Hints

### Introduction

To correct the spelling mistakes during the translation, the spell checker can be installed and used to indicate words in the target text, that need to be corrected. This should come as no surprise: OmegaT uses the Hunspell spell checker, used among others in OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird. If you use any of these programs, you may already have the essentials of the spell checker installed and just need to get OmegaT connected.

Once the spell checker has been activated and the vocabulary for the target language is available, the spell checker will monitor target segments, that are being displayed in the editing pane. Questionable words get underlined in wiggly red:

Right clicking on a highlighted word (Artund above) opens a drop-down menu, where the suggestions for the correction are listed (Art und) . Additionally you can ask the spell checker to ignore all the occurrences of the word or add it to the dictionary. Note that this is an online spell checker: if you have to do a global spell check of texts you will have to browse through the text yourself and watch for wiggly lines. The alternative is to spell check the target files with an editor, in other words outside of OmegaT so the changes you may make will not be in the translation memory.

### Spell checker options

Clicking on Options > Spell checking... will open the window below:

The above example contains already the available vocabularies. Initially it will be unpopulated as you need to specify where OmegaT should look for the vocabularies. Click on Choose... to open a dialog window, where you can select a subfolder with existing OpenOffice.org or Mozilla vocabularies. The simplest way find them is to look for files with an extensions aff or dic. OmegaT will recognize all valid dictionaries available at that location and display them. If the dictionary you want to use is already there and visible to OmegaT, you're done. If there's no dictionaries to be found, you can select an appropriate place for them and then click Install to let OmegaT look for available vocabularies. Select the vocabularies that you need in the pop-up window and then click install. The selected languages will then get installed and will eventually appear in the spell checker setup window (this may take a while ).

Please note that the installer depends on the Internet list of dictionaries. In case it is out of date or does not include the desired language, you will have to hunt for the vocabularies yourself. The OpenOffice.org contains probably the largest vocabulary collection at OpenOffice.org Dictionary site. After the dictionary extension has been downloaded and installed, the corresponding aff and dic will become available. The same can be achieved by adding a spellchecker extension to the Firefox or Thunderbird; in this case the spellchecker files will be stored in your (Firefox or Thunderbird) profile.

Make sure the language code of target files corresponds to the dictionary's language code: an FR-FR dictionary will not work with an FR target setting. You need to change the setting to FR-FR to have the spell checker recognize the correct dictionary for your target. Look for files with the name, indicating the language used and having extensions aff and dic.

### Hints

Possible reasons for the spell checker not working:

1. The check box "Automatically check the spelling of text" must be checked.

2. Check that the target language code of your project against the available vocabularies in the setup window. The spell checker determines the language to use from the target language code: if the target language is Brazilian Portuguese (PT_BR), the subfolder with vocabularies must contain the two vocabulary files, called pt_br.aff and pt_br.dic.

In case you have a large body of text already translated, but then realize the target language code of the project does not match the spell checker's language code (you specified pt_BR as the language, but there's no pt_BR vocabularies, for instance) you can simply copy the two corresponding files and rename them (from pt_PT.aff resp. pt_PT.dic to pt._BR.aff and pt_BR.dic). Of course it is much wiser, to take a short break and download the correct versions of the spellchecker.

Note that Uninstall physically deletes the highlighted vocabularies. If they are part of OpenOffice as in the above case, they will disappear from that application too. If for whatever reason you have to do that now and again, it may make sense to copy the files involved to a different folder, reserved just for OmegaT purposes.

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