I need Lion to seemlessly do stuff in English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese

[quierocekchehe]

Hello everyone! Today I purchased my first Apple computer, a beautiful 11.6'' Macbook Air. But I need some help: I use all four languages in the title and haven't found a way that OSX Lion to handle them all at once. Is this possible? For example, when I'm typing up projects with multiple languages in them in iPages or inside an email (either through web browser or Mail client).
The three finger highlight gesture of a word is amazing! It gives me the English definition, etc. How can I make it so that OSX also understands the other languages? Currently it says "no results found" Thank you all for any help!

 

[davidlv]

Hello everyone! Today I purchased my first Apple computer, a beautiful 11.6'' Macbook Air. But I need some help: I use all four languages in the title and haven't found a way that OSX Lion to handle them all at once. Is this possible? For example, when I'm typing up projects with multiple languages in them in iPages or inside an email (either through web browser or Mail client).
The three finger highlight gesture of a word is amazing! It gives me the English definition, etc. How can I make it so that OSX also understands the other languages? Currently it says "no results found" Thank you all for any help!

I don't know if you can get that dictionary working with other languages or not, but I do know you can set up the system to allow input in other languages. Open System Preferences and look at the Languages and text pane. You should ave the languages you need selected and in the Input sources tab, you have to enable the appropriate language input source. For example Kotoeri for Japanese or Chinese Simplified for Chinese, etc. You must also have the appropriate fonts enabled in Font Book.
Leaning how to switch the language input is also required, turning off the spotlight key combination is necessary for Japanese as the same keys are used to switch between English input and Japanese. Don't know how that works for Chinese or Spanish etc.
So getting the OS to handle text input is possible, but the dictionary may be limited to English only.
More knowledgeable folks should contribute here....

 

[B Gallagher]

If you want to add other dictionary packs, you can try this:

http://davidtse916.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/adding-dictionaries-to-the-built-in-dictionary-application-in-leopard/

My friend originally wrote this just after Leopard came out. It seems StarDict is no longer available, but the link on his post gives a list of alternatives. Certainly worth a try!