Not to be flippant or anything. I think these words that can cause the most visceral reaction in engineering when uttered by clients or 'idea' people. There can be a very huge gap between something simple to put in words, and a concept that is actually simple (both in the easy to understand, and in the low technical complexity sense).
For the point at hand, detecting which words belong to what language is an insanely difficult problem. Even excluding words that are purely invented but still make sense (like a new fad, a technical world, proper nouns, abbreviations, short hands etc.). Even within a single language you'll still have a hard time coming up with heuristics about what the user is typing 80% of the time (my personal experience with IMEs), especially when the user makes awful typos all the time.
Up until now, the best system I've ever seen is to use a dedicated switching button on your keyboard to switch between the language contexts. Japanese mac keyboard's 'eiji' and 'kana' buttons are really good for that, a lot better than the Control+Shift kind of pattern mainly used in linux distros for instance. It's fast, fool proof, very simple to understand from the user POV, and the input system is always focused on one kind of input only. But it translates very badly to touch screens I guess.
Not be flippant or anything; but one of the most visceral reactions I get is when someone tells me something is massively complex only because it's something nobody has cared enough about to really look into it.
I have a near 50/50 split between two languages in my day to day usage and I would already derive massive benefit from some very small tweaks, ranging from autocorrect accepting words for two languages at the same time to, like I mentioned, just offering prediction with a Markov model trained on two languages simultaneously.
These are fixes that are very easy to implement and would offer a significant benefit, yet they aren't being implemented because the developers just don't care enough.
>from autocorrect accepting words for two languages at the same time
I agree this. This is so important and so easy. I have basically gotten used to those red markers to the point I barely notice them anymore. It is easier to ignore them than to change language every time.
I'm not sure. Imagining the current iOS autocorrect for instance working on french and english at the same time would be a mess. or a mass, or messe, or mers, or messes, or miss, or moss, or Messieurs. And now I feel like playing scrabble.
And most IMEs already work with several languages in a way, since they use the sentence context coupled with a system and user dictionary that contains the most common and some set of arbitrary words from any language you want/use regularly enough to have the IME remember the words.
My comment referred to the typical Markov chain type word prediction, which is the mechanism behind the 'sentence context' you referred to in those custom IMEs.
What I described is basically taking that mechanism and baking it into the standard OS without all the custom personalization options the IMEs offer and just offer a ready to use "English + OtherLang" option.
I don't think iOS does anything like that, but there you can still reduce the threshold at which you'll auto-correct and get a significant improvement.
Just goes to show that on all platforms there are still plenty of trade-offs to be explored.
Not to be flippant or anything. I think these words that can cause the most visceral reaction in engineering when uttered by clients or 'idea' people. There can be a very huge gap between something simple to put in words, and a concept that is actually simple (both in the easy to understand, and in the low technical complexity sense).
For the point at hand, detecting which words belong to what language is an insanely difficult problem. Even excluding words that are purely invented but still make sense (like a new fad, a technical world, proper nouns, abbreviations, short hands etc.). Even within a single language you'll still have a hard time coming up with heuristics about what the user is typing 80% of the time (my personal experience with IMEs), especially when the user makes awful typos all the time.
Up until now, the best system I've ever seen is to use a dedicated switching button on your keyboard to switch between the language contexts. Japanese mac keyboard's 'eiji' and 'kana' buttons are really good for that, a lot better than the Control+Shift kind of pattern mainly used in linux distros for instance. It's fast, fool proof, very simple to understand from the user POV, and the input system is always focused on one kind of input only. But it translates very badly to touch screens I guess.