I completely agree. It is boring to see 90% of Serbian pages detected by Google translator as "Croatian".
I understand that for non Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin-native speakers, working hard and possibly doing their best to improve Google translator, it is almost impossible to distinguish between these standards. The difficulties stem from the fact that they are all in essence just localizations of one common language, sharing the same grammar and the same vocabulary, and mainly differing by the frequency of use of certain words. However, the actual Google solution by which Serbian Latin is proclaimed as Croatian is unacceptable for majority of Serbian people. After breakup of Yugoslavia, after decennial war, and after hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees from Croatia, it is offending to see a message "this page is written in Croatian" on almost every Serbian page. For example, this is the case with the official site of Serbian army, http://www.vs.rs (after selection of "latinica" in a combo box below the Serbian flag in the upper right side of the page) . Or with the official site of Serbian Ministry of Justice, http://www.mpravde.gov.rs/lt/ . And these are just some absurd examples. It repeats with virtually every Serbian page. A compromise would be to distinguish between Serbian Latin and Croatian pages using domain information, ".rs" for Serbian and ".hr" for Croatian, and Serbian/Croatian for pages in other domains. Yet, I must admit that it is only a partial solution, because it is quite possible to have Serbian ".hr" pages, e.g. posted by Serbian minority in Croatia and v.v. Additionally, this could only be a temporary solution, because one day Google might decide to incorporate Bosnian and Montenegrin... These two standards are very similar to Serbian and Croatian. Like Serbian, they both use Cyrillic and Latin alphabets (the new Montenegrin standard has two additional letters, but their use is extremely infrequent). Here, the real problem is that Bosnian is spoken only by minority of people in Bosnia (majority of people speak Serbian and Croatian), and Montenegrin is spoken by a minority in Montenegro (majority speak Serbian)... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-translate-general?hl=en.
