[myomeriko]

I would like to make a wish list of required features to offer better support of non-English languages for the Kindle 3 and hopefully for the upcoming Kindle 4.
Here is a "dream" list of enhancements.
1. Selectable user interface for various languages: Kindle owners not fluent in English would like to have the menus, fields and messages in their native language. For a start Spanish, German, French and Italian would be welcome. User's Guides in German, French, Italian and Portuguese are already available.
2.Foreign Language Dictionaries: The Kindle comes with two English-English dictionaries (New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary of English). Readers whose native language is not English would welcome translation dictionaries from English to their native language and vice versa. They probably are also looking for translation dictionaries form other languages to English, French, Spanish, Italian etc.
Note that dictionaries are available from third party sources or from the Kindle store.
3. Text to speech of found dictionary term: Many Kindle owners read English books even if his/her native language is not English. Would be useful to add a new text to speech function which would read out the found English word in the correct pronunciation. I have seen this on Chinese e-reader which not only reads out the word but also displays a small image of the "thing". TTS for non-English word pronunciation is probably too complicated.
4. Choice of more fonts: Kindle 3 offers only three typefaces: Serif (regular and condensed) and sans serif. Many users complain about that. This is special true for non-English readers and non-Latin based contentment where users are used to other fonts. Why not let the user install own fonts?
5.Enhanced search options: Search has a number of odd behaviors, even in the English content. First let's see how the find works in Documents (excluding PDF).
a) It does not have wildcards, grep syntax, etc.
b) Multiple words can be entered in the find input area, each separated by a space. The find command will attempt to find all words within a "Location", which roughly equates to a sentence, but not exactly.
c) All symbols (" , -- ' ? ! : etc) are ignored.
d) Common small words are ignored. This differs from language to language. In English "of", "and", "the", "is", "a", "and", "to", "it", "for", "with" etc. In German "die", "der", "das", "daß", "im", "in", "von", "mir", "er", "dich", "sie", "wie", "ist" etc.
e) Searches are case-insensitive. This might be ok for most cases but sometimes an exact search is useful.
f) Characters with accents and diacritical signs can usually be searched by simply ignoring the accent and entering the underlying character (search of German special letters ä=a, ö=o, ü-u, ß=ss and French letter é=e) but this does not work for many other special letters used in other European languages like French, Spanish, Danish etc.
g) Words with apostrophe are not found. This causes problems mainly in languages like French and Spanish where the apostrophe is placed often after the first letter.
6.Better support of non-Latin Languages: Kindle 3 currently official supports Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese Traditional and Simplified, Korean and Greek characters. I already described some of the problems (Dictionary, Search) but I believe there are other issues I am not aware of. For sure, none of this languages allow typing of notes or search words. I would be happy to receive some comments about this subject.
7. Support of additional Languages: Kindle 3 does not support the following languages: Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Urdu (all written from right to left), Thai, Indic scripts (Tamil, Devanagari). There are more but maybe less important. Technically it is possible to develop the support of these languages. Other manufactures have already done it. At least that could supply a "basic" support (without allowing keyboard entry) as they have it with Greek and Cyrillic.
8. Willing to pay for these enhancements? Let's face it. Development of such features cost money and in certain cases we may not be able to get them bundled in the Kindle package. If Amazon develops them, they might want to sell some of them as "extras" as they already do with foreign language dictionaries.

If you like to contribute to any of the subjects, please send me a message before June 30th
Thank you