First I have to confess that I’m pleased about the amount of attention Apple gave to supporting Romanian language on iOS 4.3 (iPhone/iPad/iPod).
I remember reporting few bugs to them regarding Romanian support and I was glad to discover that they were addressed in the next releases. It looks that they do care about the feedback they get, even if you do not have any kind of feedback regarding how they deal with a reported bug.
Still with current iOS there are few problems with the Voice Control and Romanian diacritics. Romanian language has only a small number of diacritical characters but it looks that speaking fails to recognize them.
English voice recognition and voice over used in iOS could be easily be tuned to support Romanian diacritics.
- ș - reads like sh in shut
- ț - reads like zz in pizza
- ă - reads like a in above
- î - close central unrounded vowel
- â - reads the same as î
More details regarding phonetic reading of Romanian characters can be found on wikipedia.
In addition to the voice issues listed about there is another very annoying bug inside the Romanian keyboard dictionary. Inside the default dictionary there is the word “La”, with the first letter uppercase. This is an extremely common work in Romanian and the auto-correct function will try to replace every “la” with “La”, making typing very hard. Probably this is one of the reasons why most Romanians are disabling the auto-correct functionality.
I contacted Apple again and I hope they will solve these bugs soon. And from my Romanian friends, I expect some replies with their experience and maybe some likes on Facebook if they encountered the same problems.
Update #1 - Also I have to mention the the Romanian keyboard lacks the Romanian quotation marks:
- U+201E , U+201d - first level
- U+00AB , U+00BB - second level