Why does MS Word randomly convert English to Asian characters?

January 3, 2006 12:05 PM

StupidMicrosoftFilter: Why, when I am working on a document in MS Word, does the text occasionally, suddenly, and seemingly randomly change from English to Asian characters?

This has happened to me a handful of times at work lately (XP Professional 2002; MS Word 10.5.something). I'll be typing in a document (sometimes a new one, sometimes one that's already been saved), and suddenly instead of getting letters on the screen, I'll get a little miniature "box" that converts every couple of letters into Asian characters. When this happens, the document seems to "freeze" me out of typing any further text in English.

This will happen, sometimes literally in the middle of a word, without my having gone into any toolbar or menu to change formatting, etc. -- meaning that it doesn't seem to be a result of my accidentally having toggled some sort of formatting switch (and also which means that simply hitting "Undo" doesn't do anything).

Once this happens, it renders the entire document this way -- that is, I can't just move my cursor to another part of the page and start typing in English again; the entire document now starts automatically converting letters to Asian characters.

Every time this has happened, I have gone into Tools > Language > Set Language and determined that, yes, the whole document is set in English (U.S.) by default. I'll even highlight all the text and click on "English (U.S.)" again just to make sure. Doesn't matter. Can't type in English, no matter what. Weirdly, this will also happen if I go into "Save As" and attempt to type a filename -- even THAT converts to Asian characters.

So far, the only way I've been able to get out of this is to close out of Word entirely, then open it back up and start again. Which is, of course, a total pain and means that I'm losing any text that I hadn't saved yet. So what's up? Is this some crazy, obscure bug, or am I overlooking something really obvious? (For what it's worth, it's happened a handful of times to coworkers as well, and none of us can figure out a fix.)

posted by scody to computers & internet (15 comments total)

Do you have a little box in the bottom right hand corner that says "EN" or "FR" or whatever it would say for whatever asian language you're in? This can change from time to time, although for reasons I've never understood.

It's usually white text on a blue background.
posted by jon_kill at 12:12 PM on January 3, 2006

In XP, depending on the Key Settings, Left Control+Shift or Left Alt + Shift cycles through the installed language/keyboard combinations. Accidentally pressing the combination may be the cause. Pressing it again would cycle to the next option.

To see all options (and the key combinations), right click the language icon near the Taskbar's right corner, choose Configuration, press Key Settings. It will show all options available to cycle through.

On preview, I believe this is the cause for your problem too, jon_kill.
posted by nkyad at 12:15 PM on January 3, 2006

Ah! I do indeed have that little language icon at the lower right. I've never noticed if it switches to a different language when this mysterious phenomenon happens, though I bet that it does. Accidently typing the Left Control + Shift combo seems a likely culprit. Thanks!
posted by scody at 12:22 PM on January 3, 2006

scody - this is a feature that is not on by default, and can be turned off.

Go to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options. Click the "Languages" tab. Under the "Text Services and Input" tab, click "Details..."

Here you can Remove any languages that you don't want installed. Moreover, you can turn off the feature that allows you to switch between languages from the Keyboard.

Note that a default setup of Windows does NOT install multiple languages, or turn this option on. Whoever setup your computer has to specify this during setup, or somebody has to use the process described to add languages and turn this feature on.

I'm curious how this makes Microsoft stupid.
posted by Dunwitty at 1:16 PM on January 3, 2006

Dunwitty : "I'm curious how this makes Microsoft stupid."

I believe you're reading it wrong. The Filter is stupid, not Microsoft. But I am pretty sure the cycling feature is turned on by default by most OEMs. My wife's Toshiba notebook, where we first noticed this problem, had it on when it arrived. And the XPs I installed since also had the feature (notice that out of US most Windows installations will come with at least two languages enabled and pre-installed, US English and whatever.
posted by nkyad at 1:35 PM on January 3, 2006

Word also has a feature where it tries to auto-detect the language you're using based on the words you use. This probably isn't a factor in this issue, but I have had Word spontaneously start thinking part of my document is in French (and the document subsequently sprouts a billion papercuts since English words make very badly spelled French words).
posted by kindall at 2:06 PM on January 3, 2006

Whoever setup your computer has to specify this during setup, or somebody has to use the process described to add languages and turn this feature on.

I'm curious how this makes Microsoft stupid.

By coincidence, the IT guy here at work happened to be walking by my office just now. I asked him about this, and he said that actually, when they installed this new OS on our systems, it did indeed default to this option, because it's not something he selected since it's not a feature that would have any common application at our workplace -- in fact, the very few departments here (I work at an art museum) who might need to use Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. all have entirely separate programs installed on their individual work stations to allow them to do so. So according to him, this was the default setup.

I also find Word (and XP in general) increasingly frustrating to use because every new version seems to be loaded with automatic (default) bells & whistles that actually make my job as a writer and editor more difficult, rather than less. Everyone I've ever talked with who uses Word/XP professionally agrees -- with every upgrade, we frequently have to find ways to work around or turn off "features" that disrupt, rather than augment, our work flow. At the same time, features that we need to use frequently are difficult, if not impossible, to default to. For example, in order to print ALL diacritic marks (not just common ones) in a document, so far all of us at work have only been to do so by going into File/Print > Quality/Text/Table > Details/Raster/1 BPP > Misc/Text as Graphics > Apply. Why wouldn't that simply be something that could be toggled on and off? [/rant]

But thanks for showing how to turn off the installed languages via the Control Panel. Strangely, Japanese and Korean turned off just fine, but both Chinese options (PRC and Taiwan) won't.
posted by scody at 2:06 PM on January 3, 2006

About your Word rant, you're certainly not alone. My wife, a journalist who also does a lot of technical and educational writing, still uses Word 97. She said she tried every new version and even (at my insistence) some new programs (mainly OpenOffice) and all of them either had important things completely out of place (buried inside four levels of submenus) or completely unimportant things getting in the way. She's now giving OO 2.0 a small chance (ie, agreeing to have it installed), but mainly because the nice and quick PDF generation. But all her real work is done in Word 97.
posted by nkyad at 2:18 PM on January 3, 2006

nkyad has it right, anytime you add a regionalization to XP windows turns on the language bar and the keyboard shortcuts for it. For example when I built an image I always turn on Canada for input and display so that date formatting is the correct ISO. At the same time I remove the US regionalization but many shops just leave it in (because windows complains about needing a reboot) which makes the posters problem appear.
posted by Mitheral at 2:18 PM on January 3, 2006

What an awesome question. I was having a very similar problem this afternoon, and AskMe saved my day! I never would have thought to check if the default language had accidently been changed.

However, just hitting Left-Alt-Shift until the correct language was displayed did not solve the problem. I had to go to the control panel and reset it. Even though American English was the default keyboard, and "EN" was displayed in the system tray, for some reason the characters from the Swedish keyboard kept showing up. I deselected and then reselected American English as the default, and then it worked fine.
posted by luneray at 2:54 PM on January 3, 2006

I too have been bitten by the same bug. It's nice to know what the cause is finally. This question will save me huge headaches down the line. Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!

Frankly, we still use WordPerfect at work for the reasons scody so clearly identifies. This in spite of our IT group who have threatened to take away the entire division's computers if we don't switch to Word. Pictures don't fly all over the page, it's quite a bit easier to insert "special" characters, it comes with a reasonable set of extended fonts for other languages and mathematics, and on and on. It's like Microsoft never talks to any of its customers. They've had two decades to get this right now, and Word is worse today than it was in 1990. I know it is: I was using it then.

Sorry for the derail. Can you tell it's paper-writing season?
posted by bonehead at 4:51 PM on January 3, 2006

It's like Microsoft never talks to any of its customers. They've had two decades to get this right now, and Word is worse today than it was in 1990. I know it is: I was using it then.

Yes! And the running joke around our office is "Microsoft Word: designed for writers and editors by people who have no earthly concept what writers and editors do."
posted by scody at 5:00 PM on January 3, 2006

I can't believe that Microsoft actually makes Word for real writers and editors. As far as I'm concerned, they make it for high school students to write essays, and business monkeys to write useless, never-read documents.
posted by antifuse at 2:50 AM on January 4, 2006

Scody - despite what your IT guy tells you, it's not default. If your computer already has that many languages/regionalities added - you mention Japanese, Korean, Chinese - they were specified at setup, or added later.

If they were turned on by default, everybody reading this post would also have them turned on.

I suspect that your IT guys are using a setup image they made to suit everybody, at some point in time, and you've inherited it.

I have a rather... uh, intimate knowledge of this, having setup XP over a thousand times so far (see "Lab Hell"). Of course, well over 90% of those were EN/US (English, US). It's possible that some OEM's do add multiple languages to their specific images, but again... Microsoft does not.
posted by Dunwitty at 5:56 AM on January 4, 2006

In case anybody's still looking at this: the way to get rid of *all* the languages you don't want, including US English, without a reboot, is as follows:

1. Control Panel->Regional and Language Options->Languages tab->Details->Settings tab.
2. Under "Default input language", select the language/keyboard combination you actually want.
3. Click Apply. This makes Windows actually start using your selected language, allowing you to...
4. Delete everything you don't want from "Installed services" by clicking the item, then clicking Delete.
5. Click OK.

If you delete all but one language, the Language Bar goes away.

If you're setting up Windows XP outside the US and you don't click Apply after setting the default input language, you get told that English (US) can't be deleted because it's still in use, which is (I think) why a lot of OEMs leave it installed.
posted by flabdablet at 11:25 PM on January 18, 2006