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Thread poster: karen henry
Choice of keyboard for translating French into English

karen henry  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 13:13
Member (2011)
French to English
Jan 15

I'm just starting up in the business and have purchased a pc with a French keyboard. Is it advisable to use an English keyboard to translate into French to reach full speed potential when typing?

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MartinPorto  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 12:13
Member (2011)
French to English
+ ...
Same keyboard Jan 15

It all depends if you touch-type. If you do, then it depends on your native tongue, assuming that is English, just stick with the French keyboard and remap it to English, or back to Frecnh should you need to do something in that language. I touch type, have a Portuguese keyboard, and write most of the time in English, but accasionaly in French. Just a click in the taskbar, and away I go!

Hope that helps

Martin


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Paul Harrison  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 13:13
French to English
+ ...
I use an AZERTY keyboard... Jan 16

... and translate into English. I find it saves time when I have to write emails in French and don't have to switch settings to get the special characters. As far as I am aware you can do eveything you can do with QWERTY with AZERTY, but the same cannot be said for the other way aroud.

I don't touch type and it takes a bit of getting used to but is fine once you have done.

Also, Martin, you can save a click by using SHIFT + Alt to cycle through languages in the task bar.


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karen henry  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 13:13
Member (2011)
French to English
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks for the advice Jan 16

I translate into English and touch type although I'm a bit out of practice! I did wonder if you could map the keyboard into another language - I'm afraid my knowledge of computers is limited but I'm learning fast! Something weird happened to me the other day, I was translating a French text into English on a AZERTY keyboard and suddenly I realised that my keyboard had changed into a QWERTY keyboard without me telling it to, would this be a special Word option or was my computer having a nervous breakdown?!

Thanks for the SHIFT + ALT tip I'll try that too.

Regards to you both


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Neil Coffey  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 12:13
Member (2009)
French to English
+ ...
Doesn't matter what physical keyboard you have Jan 16


karen henry wrote:
I'm just starting up in the business and have purchased a pc with a French keyboard. Is it advisable to use an English keyboard to translate into French to reach full speed potential when typing?


It doesn't essentially matter what physical keyboard you have -- what matters is what layout you configure Windows/Mac OS/etc to use. You can configure your PC to use a Russian keyboard with a Spanish layout if you want.

So why not just try some different layouts and see what works best for you?


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karen henry  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 13:13
Member (2011)
French to English
TOPIC STARTER
OK I'll try that, thanks Jan 16

[quote]Neil Coffey wrote:



It doesn't essentially matter what physical keyboard you have -- what matters is what layout you configure Windows/Mac OS/etc to use. You can configure your PC to use a Russian keyboard with a Spanish layout if you want.

So why not just try some different layouts and see what works best for you?


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Choice of keyboard for translating French into English






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