Microsoft Word Thai Indexing Gripe
I would just like to post this out to the gods that be in Microsoft developing the Thai tools for Microsoft Word.
After spending a long time with my team translating a couple of books for a client, the client required the whole document to be indexed as its English version had. The Word file in English had all the Mark Ups done very meticulously. I hired someone to come in and work with me to insert index mark ups in all of the same points in Thai – it took a LONG time. After a few weeks of doing this for both books, to my horror, when finally coming to generate the index as I’m accustomed to doing in English, it was obvious that someone hadn’t been doing their job at Microsoft when it comes to understanding the Thai language. Vowels and consonants were considered to all be consonants – and then if a portion of the vowel appeared before the initial consonant in a word, it the word would be indexed under that ‘portion’ of a vowel (thought of as a consonant) rather than the correct consonant.
E.g. – If I had the words – ก้าว ไก่ เก่า แก้ว , they OUGHT TO all be indexed under ก –
**ก
**ก้าว
ไก่
เก่า
แก้ว
But with Microsoft’s indexing, the words are indexed as:
ไ
ไก่
เ
เก่า
แ
แก้ว
ก
ก้าว
What the !@#$! were they thinking?!
This little oversight of Microsoft’s has cost me time, money and the sanity of my team. We’ve tried to manually re-index the books, but every time the slightest change is made, all the pages get thrown out of whack. I hope the new version of Office has this fixed.
If anyone else has found a solution / add-in that can help please let me know.
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