The researcher of the University of Tromse (Norway) Trond Trosterud is making an electronic Komi-English-Finnish dictionary and looking for partners in Syktyvkar (Komi Republic). He told that to the participants of the 3^rd Interregional Conference “Functioning of Finno-Ugric languages in the Internet” held in Syktyvkar in May.

 

According to Trosterud, the workgroup under his direction is creating fonts and keyboard layouts for the national languages of aboriginal peoples from the northern regions of the planet, as well as electronic spellchecking systems, dictionaries, interactive teaching programs, and Text-to-Speech applications which generate speech from e-texts. In the Barents region, such work is being done for Lappish, Komi and Nenets languages. A programmer, a linguist and two philologists work on each language.

 

The work on each language is supposed to take 3-5 years. The project is funded by the Norwegian government.

 

According to the scientist, the final stage of the project will be creating educational software which can automatically make up exercises for users studying the language. “We will be able to provide a tool for those who don’t know the Komi language but are learning it”, Trosterud explained.

 

All programs created by the workgroup will be available for free downloading and use because they are distributed under open-license conditions.

Finno-ugric media centre