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If Amazon's next kindle has a touch screen, and virtual keyboard, you can be sure one of the reasons will be to make it more conducive to internationalization and localization. Initially, I would expect localizations for at least German, French, and Spanish, and hope there are no geographic restrictions on which ones you get to choose from.
Text to speech for dictionary pronunciation is problematic for a variety of reasons. Synthesized speech is not accurate enough, and including digital audio of every word defined in the dictionary is expensive in terms of storage requirements. Theoretically the dictionary could include phonetic spellings based on IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) as indeed the NOAD included with Kindle 3 does (though I don't know if it conforms to IPA). But for other languages, someone would need to add all of those spellings from scratch, which would probably be cost-prohibitive (as would including recorded voices). Seems if you had IPA representation, you could train a synthesized TTS to read it accurately. That would be the best of both worlds but it is not trivial.
I would pay for additional TTS voices in English or other languages that I'm learning.
I would also pay for additional fonts if Amazon sold them.
I would like to pay for dictionaries, but publishers are not making them available. I don't think it is Amazon's fault. Maybe that will change as Amazon moves into more markets internationally. As it is I have collected a few 'public domain' dictionaries that volunteers have produced from PD source material.
BTW I do not see any issues with non-Latin characters in the home screen (pre-K3, yes). Cyrillic for example is okay, I will admit I haven't tried any others. If you are seeing a problem with scripts that are otherwise supported for reading, it might be an encoding issue with the metadata.
Non-latin dictionaries (like Russian) should just work, I keep meaning to send Amazon (another) complaint about this. They are going to have to fix it sooner or later, why not sooner?
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