Translate.org.za are the proud parents of a new Zulu spell checker.

What makes us such proud parents? We've ported the spell checker from the Myspell platform to Hunspell. Which means what exactly? It means that we can now spell check Zulu text at much higher precision. It also puts the platform in place to ratchet up the checkers performance.

You can try the checker as an extension for OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird.

Spell checking in Zulu is hard because it is a highly conjunctive language. This means that what in English would be seen as a number of separate words is written as one word. What this means for the spell checker is that we first need to deconstruct the Zulu word. We then check that the remaining root is a correct word and that the rules for building the expression where correct. If we fail any of that then we have a spelling error. The approach that we have taken should work in all languages from the Bantu language family which includes other languages like Swahili.

We have most of the most productive classes of nouns and verbs covered. Our work now is to expand the rules as needed and most importantly to add and classify many root forms.

The initial work for the Zulu spell checker was done as part of the ANLoc spell checker project with funding from the International Development Research Centre.