Balkanization of translation efforts

Posted Jan 13, 2009 16:48 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Balkanization of translation efforts by grakic
Parent article: Localization under a government umbrella

it's hard to find young people in Croatia who know how to write in Cyrillic

I wonder why. Cyrillic is not so difficult to learn, after all. I can read Cyrillic and Greek, even though I don't understand the languages, takes a few hours to learn them all. I can understand why young people in Vietnam can't read old Vietnamese texts written with Chinese characters, but for someone speaking an Serbo-Croatian dialect, having access to all texts in all those dialects is much easier (~30 characters vs. >5000 characters).

But maybe it's just me. My mother once set me a bounty to learn Fraktur, to have access to the older books in our family library, and it took me an afternoon to get halfway fluent in reading it (and get the bounty). The difference between a Latin script and Fraktur is certainly less than between Latin and Cyrillic, but the experience broke a dam, and I understood that learning other alphabets is fairly easy. I added Greek and Cyrillic letters to my alphabets, and then stopped due to lack of further sources (that was all way before the Internet).