Cultural Impacts on Electronic Publishing: Experience in Serbia

Discusses the linguistic influences on an electronic publishing infrastructure in an environment with unstable linguistic standardization from the computational point of view. Essentially, in Serbia in the last half of the century (at least) publishing is based on the following facts: two alphabetic systems are regularly in use with the possibility to mix both alphabets in the same document; the various dialects are accepted as a part of a linguistic norm; orthography is unstable ‐ presently, several linguistic attitudes that have different views of the orthographic norm are under discussion; and, in Serbia, many minority languages are in use, which makes it difficult to provide efficient contact between different communities through electronic publishing. In this context, a systematic solution that responds to this complex situation has not been developed in the frame of traditional Serbian linguistics and lexicography in a way that enables the adequate incorporation of the new publishing technologies. Owing to these constraints, the direct application of electronic publishing tools frequently causes the degradation of the linguistic message. In such an environment, the promotion of electronic publishing therefore needs specific solutions. The paper discusses the general frame based on the specifically encoded system of electronic dictionaries that makes electronic texts independent of some of the mentioned constraints. The objective of such a frame is to enable the linguistic normalization of texts at the level of their internal representation, and to establish bridges for communicating with other language societies. Some aspects of electronic text representation that ensures its correct interpretation in different graphical systems and in different dialects are described. This also allows text indexing and retrieval using the same techniques that are available for languages not burdened with these problems.