XBench adds spell-checking plug-in

A couple of weeks ago ApSIC released a new plug-in for their XBench. Based on HunSpell dictionaries, it checks spelling for a number of languages, including Russian. I briefly tested it and certainly found both advantages and drawbacks which I describe below.

The plug-in works in a separate window and allows you to confirm which spelling errors are real errors (in my test there were only two of them out of a couple of dozens of suspects), and those errors are then included to the list of all the errors which you can easily export and send, for instance, to a translator or to an editor.

It is apparently great that you can spell-check your project while doing other quality checks; it basically means that users can now collect really comprehensive reports on errors found in their bilingual documents.

To my mind, it is also the most convenient way to spell-check TagEditor files. I personally don't like TagEditor's built-in spell-check feature. What I normally do is copy the text from TagEditor, paste it to MS Word, delete hidden text, Trados tags and source text and then spell-check the rest. Because of those deletions, some words glue resulting to an increased number of spelling errors. XBench handles TagEditor files correctly, thus eliminating this problem.

However, there are a few quite shortcomings as well.

The most important one is that HunSpell dictionaries are not rich enough - at least for Russian. Therefore, the plug-in reports too many words that in fact do exist in Russian.

The other quite serious thing is that there's no suggestion feature and no hints where the error is. Sometimes it is not easy to find the error at a glimpse, especially if you have to handle a long list of different errors, and your eyes are tired. Sometimes there are even more complicated problems. In my practice, some clients correct Russian translations using non-Cyrillic letters that look like Cyrillic ones (i.e. Russian А and Latin A, Russian Р and English P etc.) It is a spelling error, but you can never recognize it visually, and this will result into keeping this misspelled word and possibly adding it to the dictionary (as soon as the plug-in supports this feature). To my knowledge, HunSpell project does support suggestions, so this is the implementation drawback. Hopefully the next version of the plug-in will support suggestions or at least hints.

All in all, the plug-in is already helpful despite that some functionality is really missing.

Important! There was a response from the developers: I really didn't notice that there is the suggestion feature. In order to use it, just put the mouse cursor over the misspelled word.