Stellenbosch Publishers

ProefLeser:
ProefLeser is an Afrikaans spelling checker interacting with Microsoft Word (all recent versions). It reads your document (or part of it) and stops at every unknown word, supplying a list of possible corrections. You can select one of these or type your own correction. You can also add your own words or short phrases to the Afrikaans personal dictionary.
The program also has access to an Afrikaans/English dictionary. If for instance it stops at an English word in your document, you could look up the Afrikaans translation and replace the English word. You can also use the program on its own in to look up how to spell words in Afrikaans and to obtain Afrikaans/English translations, i.e. without Microsoft Word.
NB The program is not part of Microsoft Word itself, i.e. it is not one of its internal dictionaries.

Specifications:

450 000 Afrikaans words/phrases.
84 000 Afr to Eng (and vice versa) translations.
Wildcard search on Afrikaans words.
Personal words can be added. These are stored in a standard Microsoft Access database. This means that you can import your own word lists, add, change and correct single entries etc., provided you are able to use Microsoft Access
Link to a thesaurus (synonyms) program via the GrEAT button (this link will be implemented later although GrEAT is fully functional on its own).
A practical "Replace All" function. It will stop at each reoccurence of the error and suggest the last correction. You can accept this or ignore it (errors are not always errors)
You can cycle through the last 20 corrections/translations.
When adding to the personal dictionary, you can make the added word lower case.
ProefLeser can be set so that is allways on top of Microsoft Word or not.
ProefLeser can be set to only read Afrikaans parts of a document. You use Tools Language in Microsoft Word to define the Afrikaans parts as Afrikaans and the others as English (You can also define the entire document as Afrikaans and then define the English parts as English - whatever is most efficient)
NB the html and afk features are not yet implemented.

Limitations:

The number of translations is limited to 84 000 words/phrases (but see further development).
The personal dictionary is only used to ascertain whether a word should be regarded as correct. The words in the personal dictionary will not be used to suggest corrections, i.e. only the main dictionary is used for this purpose.
The Microsoft Word "tracking changes" option must be off.

Further developement:

New words, phrases and translations are added on a continuous basis.
Added (personal dictionary) words also used for suggestions.
Able to read text files.
Able to read HTML files.
Able to ignore abreviations.
Able to interpret Afrikaans constructions like "masjien- en aanlegkostes".
Specialist dictionaries, e.g. medical or legal terms.
Link to synonyms via GrEAT.

Examples of Use

Spell-checking an Afrikaans part in a Microsoft Word document

Looking up an Afrikaans word for an English word in Microsoft Word document

Wildcard search (prefix, infix, suffix):

Translation of common phrases, expressions and collocations:

A feasible infix search:

An impractical prefix search:

A (part) suffix search