Cultural Impacts on Electronic Publishing: Experience in Serbia

The paper discusses the linguistic influences on an Electronic Publishing infrastructure in an environment with a low-level of linguistic standardization. Essentially, in Serbia in the last half of the century (at least) publishing has been based on the following facts: 1. Two alphabetic systems are regularly in use with the possibility to mix both alphabets in the same document; 2. The various dialects are accepted as a part of a linguistic norm; 3. Orthography is unstable—presently, several linguistic attitudes that have different views of the orthographic norm are under discussion; 4. 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. Due 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. In this paper we discuss a general frame based on a specifically encoded system of electronic dictionaries that makes the electronic texts independent from some of the mentioned constraints. The objective of such a frame is: (1) to enable the linguistic normalization of texts on the level of their internal representation, and (2) to establish bridges for the communication with other language societies. We underline some aspects of electronic text representation that ensures its correct interpretation in different graphical systems and in different dialects. This also allows text indexing and retrieval using the same techniques that are available for languages not burdened with these problems.