Thread: Russian Spell Check

Does anyone know how I would go about spell/grammear checking a Russian document in MS Word? Is there some sort of pack I need to download, another program I have to get, or do I have to buy a Russian version of office?

The spell checker should be on the office CD or whatever CD word is on, providing it's 98, 2000 or 2002 I think, I don't know if XP has the spellchecker built in.

There are proofing tool software packages you can get, as well as these sites that try to sell cheap ones, I'd make sure your version has one or not before buying anything.

Just try making sure you've installed additional components the spellchecker is part of.

I got Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003 and it works like a charm for me. I have spell checkers in almost all languages, Russian being one of them So you can buy it directly from Microsoft. It even works with outlook (for email).

I tried what I had in Office, and the included spell checker apparently doesn't do russian -- I kept getting errors for .dll files. I'm not shocked though; I tried before and I tried installing something from the CDs but found nothing on their to install.

I didn't know that MS released a "proofing-tools" software package -- that's incredibly lame. The hundreds of dollars that Office XP retails for isn't enough to cover that? Sheesh. Anyway, thanks for at least bring it to my attention, but I'm too much of a tightwad to shell out that kind of money, especially to MS. (And I'm sure it does work with Outlook, but I avoid that like the plague!).

Thanks guys.

Try MS downloads site. I am not 100% sure, but I think I saw spellcheckers for different languages there. If this fails, try getting "Орфо" - the best-known Russian spellcheck software. The basic version is fairly inexpensive.

I spent $15 for my proofing tools. It makes sense that they would sell it seperately, why would the average american pay extra for the MS Office to have thousands of linguistics making spellcheckers for languages they never heard of?

My Word program is not set up with Russian spellcheck either. I get the popup thing saying that it can't find the grammar file msngru32.dll or something.

Originally Posted by translations.nm.ru

Try MS downloads site. I am not 100% sure, but I think I saw spellcheckers for different languages there. If this fails, try getting "Орфо" - the best-known Russian spellcheck software. The basic version is fairly inexpensive.

AFAIK the Microsoft's Russian spellchecker is based on Орфо.

Originally Posted by translations.nm.ru

Try MS downloads site. I am not 100% sure, but I think I saw spellcheckers for different languages there. If this fails, try getting "Орфо" - the best-known Russian spellcheck software. The basic version is fairly inexpensive.

You are correct -- there is an Irish spellchecker there! Other than that though, all I found were the encoding packs for Asian languages. Still, I'm glad I checked. I'm going to have to look into Орфо I suppose. Thanks for the tips.

I spent $15 for my proofing tools. It makes sense that they would sell it seperately, why would the average american pay extra for the MS Office to have thousands of linguistics making spellcheckers for languages they never heard of?

I wish I could find them for 15 bucks, and although I haven't searched extremely thoroughly, I haven't found that price anywhere. As for your second point, you are right the average Amercian doesn't need Russian or Finnish or Urdu spell-checking components. But it's for that very reason that we shouldn't have to pay extra for a feature that perhaps 1 in 500 users needs. They were not developed for the average Western consumer -- and for that very reason were not dependent on the funding from their products; they were made to offer support to the Russian users, etc. Why not just have it as an optional, non-default installation? Look, I'm a capitalist, I know MS is out to make a buck and should be able to do so, but I just find it irritating that they don't offer this support. Ultimately, this ranting achieves nothing (except making me feel better), so I'll stop here.

My Word program is not set up with Russian spellcheck either. I get the popup thing saying that it can't find the grammar file msngru32.dll or something.

Mine is a different file mssp3ru.dll (I think?) but same idea.

So essentially I've come to two conclusions: a)MS annoys me (as usual) and b) I need to look in to Орфо. Thanks, guys.

Looks like this site has MS Office proofing tools for many languages, including Russian: http://www.zjzmpop.co.yu/
I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure if it works.

Originally Posted by Triton

Looks like this site has MS Office proofing tools for many languages, including Russian: http://www.zjzmpop.co.yu/
I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not sure if it works.

Thanks for the link. It doesn't seem to have any viruses (which I was really worried about) and it does seem to work -- kind of, sort of, sometimes. For some odd reason it seems to randomly not work sometimes giving me a bunch ?-marks -- it looks alot like the statistics screen in English where it tells you # of paragraphs, sections, etc. I'll have to play with it a bit more. One possible issue is that it's techinically for Office 2000, but works for XP in theory (which is what I have). Maybe it somehow fouls up because of this.

UPDATE: It is in fact the "Readability Statistics" that it displays afterwords, though in Cyrillic Encoding so you can't actually read it. The only time it seems to do this though is if you have no red or green underlined text -- ie your document is flawless -- which it also does in English. So basically, yes it seems as though it does work.

Thanks!