How do people type different languages into computer?

Question

We have English keyboards. I never saw any other keyboard in my life. I've been wondering for a long time. How do people in Korea, China, Russia, Muslim countries and some European countries where English is less known. Do they have keyboards in their native language? I mean are the keyboard directly manufactured in their native language. Or do they use some kind of keyboard mapping softwares to acheive the task. I've been searching in Google images to have a glance at their computers but didn't find any real key pads for computers/smartphones.

If they have some non-English keyboard. Then how would they type web URLs? URLs possible in other languages also? If they have to type English URLs then it also means that they need to know English.

I've seen in some movies that they have all their softwares, windows have text in their native language. How do they have some different language?

I feel lost & confused.

If you have any screenshots / pics of such non-english computer please post. I want to see one.

Answer 1

You can use one keyboard for all languages:

Answer 2

Japanese keyboard:

In Japan people write their Japanese script on a similar QWERTY keyboard like most of us do. Since there are way to many signs in their language to place on a keyboard.

They solved this by typing the audible version of the signs and words. So if someone wanted to say "こんにちは" ("Konnichiwa" in our Roman letters) which means hello in Japanese they would actually type

ko -> change it into the ko sign, then continue with n -> becomes the n sign and so on untill the complete word is written.

This works for most languages similar to Japanese (as far as I've come across them)

Answer 3

There are two methods. The first is to use a keyboard in the native alphabet, with the OS translating the keycodes to the native characters. The other is to use an Input Method to have Roman letters converted into the foreign script.

Answer 4

Here's a Thai keyboard, all the characters from the Thai alphabet fit, just.

Korean Keyboard (you compose the characters using sub characters, or from anglicisation. There are multiple input methods.)

Chinese Keyboard

(Not the standard style!)

The usual Chinese keyboard

(again, you compose the characters by using sub characters, or from anglicisation e.g. pin-yin )

Answer 5

I think they'd still get English by default with whatever keyboard they use(if all they did is plug the keyboard in). Some use a standard keyboard with labels stuck on it for their language. A keyboard with a special script written on the letters, would function the same. In order for their language to come up when they hit ABCDE, they go in windows xp, to start..ctrl panel..regional and language options.. and they add for their language. The Win XP CD would be inserted, for certain languages e.g. one that uses a complex script.. that can have dots.. like hebrew.

Then from the taskbar they can choose which language they want, from the ones they installed.

So you could type a foreign language on your computer with your keyboard. (ignore the yellow star in the pic.. somebody just added that in for effect!)

If you look in regional and language options, you see you can use a shortcut to switch to a particular language. And once you install support for right to left languages, you find that CTRL+LEFT SHIFT, causes all text to be aligned left. CTRL+RIGHT SHIFT, causes all text to be aligned right. To type dots e.g. in hebrew, one would enter the letters, then hit CAPS, to turn caps lock on, then shift+num

And most don't do this, but if one doesn't like that mapping.. one can create their own and install it as if installing a new language! MSKLC is the program for that.

People may have folders and filenames, with names with non-english characters. and open them..

I think getting around windows e.g. control panel, device manager, menus in standard programs e.g. windows calculator e.t.c. will still be in english. (at least in windows xp anyway. when I tried. but maybe in future more standard programs will have their menus in a foreign language). I think windows technical settings including error messages might remain in english otherwise technical support could be trickier because people google error messages.

I did find a picture of ms word with arabic menus.. so maybe microsoft office 2003 specifically has that capability. This article shows pictures of that. http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/arabicdev/office/office2003/word.aspx#_Toc50211798 But certainly long before then.. just like even in notepad, you can type a foreign language in.

Answer 6

Hebrew keyboard:

Answer 7

This part wasn't addressed in other answers, so here it goes:

Web-site addresses are often written using Latin characters. Sometimes homoglyphs are used to create an interesting name for a web-site. For example http://6yka.com/ looks a lot like бука (it means noise and the site is about a political magazine, so they are trying to make noise about politicians).

Another point is English knowledge. Many languages use Latin characters and many many languages can be transliterated to subset of Latin characters which are used for website address names. There is no reason why someone would need to know English in order to use Latin characters. Here are some examples of that: website of my country's state TV station.

However for some time it has been possible to have addresses which don't use Latin characters. Here's address of a fan-club for a sports club in my city: http://www.делије.net. When using such system, the Cyrillic part is translated into Latin using so-called punycode. So делије is automatically translated into xn--d1acalo9o. This way name of the website can be in another language if the registry supports it. The problem with this is the need to switch keyboard layouts when typing.

Sometime later, it was decided that there should be domains available for countries in their own native language. This is currently in implementation and is still somewhat problematic (for example requirements state that localized domain can't have any letters which have homoglyphs in Latin. Because of this Ukraine (or Україна as it's known locally) can't have its own domain!), but there are sites which which are using it. Here too punycode is used, but this time for entire name of the site. Here's for example website of President of Russian Federation: президент.рф

Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug with SU so the links can't be clicked. You can always use copy/paste method.

Answer 8

I am typing in my spanish keyboard, and of course it is different to yours (english). I have the same keys (some are in different places), and also áéíóúñç, etc... In my keyboard, some keys have two or three different characters (you can write them pressing shift or Alt Gr at the same time you type). In France the keyboards are also different (some letters are not in the same place), and also in Germany (for example the Y and the Z are switched one with the other). If you hace a different keyboard, you should change your keyboard mapping in your operating system (in Spain, the system by default assume we have spanish keyboards). But in Spain, France, Germany, etc. we have the same encoding /that is latin-1 or ISO-8859-1, I think the same as you). In other countries (for example Portugal, arabic, Japan, etc.) they have different keyboards, and also different encodings, that means that if I write a flat-text file, with special characters (for example España (meaning Spain)), they will read different characters.

Answer 9

You want to go to the Control Panel, choose "Clock, Language, Region." Then go to "Region and Language." On that you will find four tabs: 'region,' 'location,' 'keyboards and languages,' and 'adminstrative' Click 'keyboards and languages.' There on the bottom will be an item "How can I install additional languages." Click on that and follow the directions. On my computer, I have enabled the languages to type in Hebrew, Greek, Russian. There are many languages that the computer can type in but it may take some tinkering and consulting to install the more complex languages like Arabic, or Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese. Good luck.

Answer 10

There's this thing you can download on SEVERAL different sites, that is COMPLETELY FREE, it's a language romanization to language. My cousin and sister have it, since we live in the US, we don't have other keyboards, so, we downloaded this thing for chinese called a pin-yin translator. You can download cool versions of it, and they work in different languages, but only as you download it. You can use by typing the "pin-yin" or pronounciation first, press spacebar, and it will come out as charecters.. You can try to look for it on Google, or Baidu, possiibly Bing, and a few will show up. If you can't find it, you might have to use a different keyboard for typing.

Answer 11

My keyboard (swedish keyboard) have the following letters:

Q W E R T Y U I O P Å

A S D F G H J K L Ö Ä

Z X C V B N M