¡Su mac es multilingüe también! (Your Mac is multilingual too!)

I am a student just like many of our loyal readers here at MacApper. In my High School, you must take a foreign language course, typically Spanish or French. Writing in a foreign language on your computer is a great way to mess around with and hopefully learn another language. I experimented with the OS X International preferences and easily prepared my Mac for this task.

Macs support most major languages and I found that it really helped in my studies. In this quick article I will teach you how to make your Macintosh multilingual too.

First comes enabling your computer for foreign language use. To do this, open System Preferences, select International and click the Input Menu tab.

To begin using your Mac as your multilingual friend, check the “Show input menu in menu bar” option. By doing this you’ll have full control over the languages in any program. Now you are ready to begin enabling languages. Under “Select the keyboard layouts, input methods, and palettes for the input menu” click the Keyboard Viewer checkbox. By enabling Keyboard Viewer, you can view the keyboard layout for the language that is selected. Back in System Preferences, select the language you would like to begin typing.

TextEdit and Mellel II are the two applications that I use for actually typing these different languages. They both bring good things to the table for a multilingual Mac. I use TextEdit for on the fly typing in any language. Just by simply using the keyboard shortcut you designated for the Input Menu, or manually switching languages from the Input Menu, you are ready to type in your preferred language. TextEdit is the free and basic text editor that comes with every Mac. In order to use it, open it up, (switch languages,) and begin typing with the on-screen keyboard.

On the other hand, there is Mellel II which was actually designed for multilingual typing and even supports right to left languages like Hebrew (what I study now). If you’re a person who finds themselves constantly needing to type in other languages, and the on-screen keyboard just isn’t efficient enough for you, you can buy some cheap stickers to place on your keyboard. This allows you to type with your computer’s keyboard much easier. The alternative is to buy a multilingual keyboard with letters from the language you want to type in, rather than an English keyboard.

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