Check spelling in an unavailable language 2

This article explains how to install spell-checking facilities using the Office (97-2003) proofing tools for a language not included with WLMail. What if you want to check your spelling in yet another language, for which the proofing tools are not available? Here is a workaround which makes this possible if you only have a list of words in the language involved. It might only work properly for languages using the latin alphabet – I know virtually nothing about RTL (right-to-left) languages like Arabic and Hebrew, and even less about Eastern languages using a completely different language system, like CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) or other Eastern languages. But this method works for me for Icelandic, so there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work for the one you’re particularly interested in.
Wordlists are widely available on the Internet. The ones you find may be optimized for another spell-checking mechanism, so the list might need a bit of editing before it can be used in WLMail. For example, the Icelandic one I found listed first all the proper names which always have to start with a capital letter, then all the other words – but these others all had ‘/A’ at the end, I suppose indicating that they were properly spelt whether they started with a capital letter or not. It only took a moment or two to remove all those ‘/A’ using search and replace in Notepad.
So, once you’ve found your wordlist, proceed as follows:
(1) From the list of languages shown in WLMail at Options > Spelling, select as a surrogate one you’re otherwise not likely to use. I chose English (United States), because I always use English (United Kingdom).
(2) Look up the LCID in hex for the language you chose at (1) if you don’t know it.
(3) Open your wordlist in Notepad, then use Save as (with file type All files ) to save it with the name langhhhh.lex, where hhhh is the four-digit LCID in hex. English (United States), for example, has LCID 1033 in decimal or 0409 in hex, so the file name would be lang0409.lex. Save the file in %localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Proof. (%localappdata% is Windows shorthand for the folder known in Windows 7 and Vista as C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local; on XP it’s called C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local settings\Application Data, where C: is the drive where Windows is installed).
(4) In WLMail, at Options > Spelling, select the surrogate language and Install  it if it’s not already installed. On the same tab, ensure that Check spelling in current input language and Check my spelling as I type are both selected.
(5) Follow these instructions to check spelling in more than one language.
Spelling checkers can be very useful, but they are not to be trusted implicitly. No spell check will correct your mistake if you wrote ‘their’ when you should have written ‘there’, for example. When using this wordlist workaround, note that a misspelt word in the language you’re writing might well be a correctly spelt one in the ‘surrogate’ language.  If it is, WLMail will not flag it as misspelt.