Special Words User Guide - Language Support

Inbuilt Languages

We don't have a different version of an app for each language, instead we offer one version containing support for all supported languages. This is so we can best help bilingual and multilingual users, and those starting to learn a new language.

Where our apps include recorded audio, we always use native speakers for each language, and in some cases we offer a further choice of voice (e.g. male and female). Where there is no recorded audio, the device's text to speech synth voice will read the words aloud.

The user interface and the default 96 word list are available in 28 languages. We currently support British English (male, female and child voices), American English, Australian English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Dutch (Netherlands and Belgian), Finnish, French, German (male and female), Greek, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Luxembourgish, Norwegian Bokmål (male and female), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Welsh.

Our downloadable resources are currently available in British English, American English, Spanish and Italian. We hope to add more languages in the future, but in the meantime you can still download the resources and change the text to be in any language you wish. Most of our downloadable resources use text-to-speech.

If you are interested in helping us make any of our apps available in additional languages, please contact us.

Adding Content in Your Own Language

If your language is currently not available within the app, you can still use it to create your own word lists in your desired language.

You can change the text, picture or recorded sound for any word, by tapping the ⓘ button at the right of a word. To add a new word, tap the + button then tap in the text field to change the text. Use the on screen keyboard which appears or the desktop's physical keyboard. Find out more about creating a word list in Chapter 4.

Profile Languages

By default, built in words and sounds for any profile are displayed and spoken in the activities using whichever language the app or device itself is configured to use. The app comes with built in words and sounds in many languages, but if the selected language isn't one of these, then English is used instead.

However, you can explicitly set the language for any individual profile, to override this default by any one of the languages supplied with Special Words. For instance, if working with a bilingual child, who is learning written words in both English and Spanish, you could have one profile set to use English, and another to use Spanish.

Words and sounds you add yourself are not translated for you: if you added the word “Daddy” to the English profile, you could use the same picture in the Spanish profile, but would need to replace the text and sound by e.g. “Papá”.

For some languages, a choice of voices is available for built in words. Currently: child, female or male in British English, and female or male in German and Norwegian.

Changing the App's Language

By default the app interface, words and sounds will be displayed using whichever language the device itself is set to use. You can quickly change languages within Special Words Plus by tapping Actions then Settings. Within the settings navigate to Language and you will see a list of currently supported languages in the app, you may need to scroll to see more. Tap the language you would like to use and a tick will appear on the right, then tap < Settings and the app will refresh to use your desired language.

By changing the language within Settings will only change the language of Special Words Plus. Other apps will continue to use the language the device is set to use.

If Language is set to Default and you change the device's language, you need to then use Actions > Reset > Flush Cache to tell the app that the default language has changed.

Text to Speech

Depending on the language applicable to a profile, where text to speech is used the app will endeavour to select an appropriate voice provided by the web browser or operating system. The quality of these voices can vary, and is not determined by Special iApps. On iPhone and iPad, the voices supplied by Apple are available in standard and enhanced variants. We strongly recommend you download and select enhanced ones. You can do this in the device's Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content > Voices.

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