There are sometimes situations in which the writing in the Romanian language has to be either corrected or tormented with regard to specific diacritics. In case of using the Writer component within the LibreOffice or OpenOffice office suite, the correction or tormenting of these diacritics can be carried out – at least in a certain respect – by using an extension: LibraryDiacritice.
Once installed, this extension allows the replacement of characters ș and ț with comma below to those with cedilla below or vice versa, entering Romanian diacritics with the help of the mouse for situations where the Romanian keyboard is not activated in the system, or total elimination of Romanian diacritics by replacing them with characters without diacritics (ASCII)
The name and concept of this extension belongs to Tiberiu-Cristian Leon; the version shown here brings some improvements in terms of user interaction (UI) – such as, for example, the multilingual user interface.
Although it may seem strange (or even unthinkable) to some, there are also users who prefer – or at least accept – to work with graphics or digital image editing programs whose menus are translated into Romanian. This is the case (especially) of those who occasionally use such programs, who do not want to remember mechanically what certain functions do within the programs and to whom the expression in Romanian language is convenient anyway.
Whatever the reasons (this may be a separate topic) and regardless of the program used, the translations of the terms that populate those menus, especially in such a specific case, must be as coherent as possible in terms of the terminology used.
The technical details of cultural elements should be underpinned by clear and unequivocal documentation, so that referring to a specific rule of a language or culture does not put in trouble any of the parties who wish to interact in either way.
However, there are technical details left simply to chance and of which we are told some crap about a foreign influence that is said to wipe out our Romanian tradition, while important national landmarks are recorded on the basis of criteria that are worthy of the Middle Ages.
This article was published on Contributors.ro.
Quote from a joint Council Of Europe & European Commission declaration, 26 September 2011:
Against the current backdrop of increasing mobility, globalisation of the economy and changing economic trends, the need to learn languages and develop plurilingual and intercultural education is more obvious than ever before.
My mobility didn’t increased when compared to the past and neither do I feel the need for more – I thank them for their concern anyway – but it is also true that there is an increasing amount of mobile devices that surrounds me. And on the matter, on 30 July 2014,
the Commission proposes to reject this petition to legislate for the protection of the cultural and linguistic heritage of Member States in the field of modern electronic systems.
The way accented national letters are generated on modern mobile devices discourages proper writing in one’s mother tongue. Strangely nobody seems to care, while the European Union claims the Union shall contribute to the flowering of the culture of the Member States, the plurality of languages, cultural diversity, preservation of regional traditions, blah, blah.
Rather technical than purely linguistic:
A sporadic stringing of ideas on various topics, unrelated to anything else around here.
In no particular order:
The time that stands still: an SMS text message continues to treat with contempt most of the world languages, just as it did from the very beginning.
An attempt on my part to rectify this situation has deviated into a legislative proposal at European level on the protection of the cultural and linguistic heritage of EU member states from the perspective of modern electronic systems (full text ), meanwhile becoming a very long, intricate and probably endless story.
Derived from the context of this endless story, in 2019 I formulated another legislative proposal at European level on regulation of languages of audiovisual toys in the EU (full text ), on which the European Commission threw the cat into the backyard of others, without, however, contradicting the factual situation.
It’s about Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit computer from the past century. There are many web sites around treating this subject, however, I tried to focus on something less usual: the +3.
My name is Cristian Secară. Secărică is just a nickname given by friends and colleagues, a naming that I used for registering the internet domain many years ago.
From a technical standpoint, this web site has a multilingual structure (Romanian / English), but the articles themselves are mostly written in a single language variant - in principle that of the target audience. Some menus or explanations are shown in the language as defined by the user’s browser settings or in the one chosen by clicking the flags located on the main menu bar, but the content of articles is, in general, unique.