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About Language Tagging

“Language tagging” is a term referring to setting the metadata properties of a document or sections of a document to indicate the language used. Tagging the language of a content is important for controlling the pronunciation engine of a screen reader. For instance, tagging a Spanish phrase such as ¿Cómo se llama Usted? as Spanish would trigger the word llama being pronounced with an initial /y/ instead of an initial /l/.

Other benefits to language tagging include activating language-specific spell-checking/proofing tools and optimized search across multilingual documents.

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office includes utilities to mark and spell check text in major world languages such as Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Finnish, Hindi, Hungarian, and many others. To access the spell checkers, you have to mark your text in a specific language.

Office 2007+ for Windows

As of Office 2007, you can mark text as non-English in the Review tab. To mark your text, do the following:

  1. Highlight the non-English text.
  2. Click the Review tab on the Word toolbar,
  3. In the Proofing section on the left, select the globe icon (Set Language). A pop-window will open where you can select an appropriate
    language.
  4. Perform the spell check. The non-English text will be checked against the non-English dictionary.
    Globe icon in Review tools

Note: If no list appears or the spell-check does not work properly, check to see if the appropriate dictionaries have been installed. They are available on installation CD’s for Microsoft Office

Macintosh Office

The following instructions apply to Macintosh and to earlier versions of Office for Windows.

  1. Highlight the non-English text.
  2. Go to the Tools then Language then Set Language. A pop-window will open where you can select an appropriate
    language.

NOTE: If no list appears or the spell-check does not work properly, check to see if the appropriate dictionaries have been installed. They are available on installation CD’s for Microsoft Office.

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PDF

Language tagging can also be accomplished in a tagged PDF within the full version Adobe Acrobat following the instructions below.

Note: For best results, use a tagged file created Microsoft Office for Windows, Open Office for Mac or InDesign.

Set Language for a Document

  1. In Adobe Acrobat, go to the File menu, then select Properties.
  2. In the Properties window, click the Advanced tab.
  3. Set the Language menu to English or some other appropriate language.
    Note: If the language is not present, then you can manually enter an ISO-639 language code.

Set Language for a Portion of the Document

  1. In Adobe Connect, open the Tags window
    1. Go to the View menu, then Show/Hide, then Navigation Panes.
    2. Check the option for Tags. The Tags icon (green price tag) will appear in the far left.
    3. Click the Tags icon to open the list of tags.
  2. Click the arrow next to the initial tag to reveal lower layers of tag structure.
  3. Find the tag (e.g. P) corresponding the non-English word or phrase.
  4. Right click the tag and select Properties.
  5. Select the appropriate Language from the menu.
    Note: If the language is not present, then you can manually enter an ISO-639 language code.

HTML

See Language Tagging for the Web for information on how to insert the LANG tag.

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