I am implementing the transliteration from Cyrillic to Latin for Serbian Wikipedia. I am not sure that Serbian or Belarussian transliteration can pass "live transliteration" without problems.
Chinese situation is almost clean: One set of characters should be changed into another set. If they use Latin (or Cyrillic) alphabet (for referencing) or Arabic numbers, they would not change it during transliteration.
Transliteration between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets is complicated because of a number of problems (Serbian Latin and Cyrillic ortographies have some differences, too): If Latin alphabet in Belarussian has equal status (such as in Serbian, almost) with Cyrillic, you can't forbid writing in Latin. And if you want to transliterate from Latin to Cyrillic, you'll have a lot of English words transliterated in Cyrillic. Also, what about referencing in Cyrillic? If you add some Russian bibliography, you'll have Russian text transliterated into Latin.
So, I started to build some (static) infrastructure (using pywikipediabot) for Serbian. As the situation is similar for Belarussian, we can do it together (or you can use my code when I finish it for Serbian Wikipedia).
On Mar 25, 2005 6:58 PM, monk@zoomcon.com monk@zoomcon.com wrote:
Hello wikitech-l,
Belarusian language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_language) has now two quite widely used alphabet versions - Cyrillics and Latin (actually, it also has Arabic alphabet, but it is too rarely used).
For now, be: wikipedia uses Cyrillics. But we really need Latin version for those, who prefers to use this alphabet. We have strict bidirectional rules to transform any text between Cyrillics <-> Latin.
We are interested in creating of a "live mirror" (automatic translator) between Cyrillics and Latin alphabets for be: Wikipedia. I mean, it would be great, if anyone could read and submit any article in either alphabet.
As far as i know, something similar was created for different alphabets of Chinese language, so this issue should be worked over already.
I'm myself an experienced PHP+MySQL developer, so I can directly participate in this project.
Can anyone provide their thoughts and any help about this issue? It is surely interesting and quite important thing.
Thank you.
-- Best regards, Monk ([[en:User:Monkbel]] mailto:monk@zoomcon.com
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