South Slavic

From Open Progress

The South Slavic project aims to create a round trip machine translation for South Slavic languages. The South Slavic languages are Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Slovenian. The reason is that while all these languages have cultures that share the same root and the languages are generally mutually understandable, the difference is emphasised to support the notion of difference and justifying the differences between people.

The origin of this project can be found in the South Slavic Wikipedia projects, at the start of the project there was already software that did a conversion from Cyrillic to Latin script. When the WMF language commission was started, it had in its charter that projects would only be started for linguistic reasons. The consequence was that as Montenegrin is closer to Serbian then American is to English, this request was denied. As there are Wikipedias for the other South Slavic languages, there was a call for a solution.

As there is an important group of people in the South Slavic area interested in this project, it was considered that while the work on the project itself should be done in the area, the management of the project needs to be done by someone who is not involved in the South Slavic culture and languages. Consequently the WLDC is well positioned to play a role.