What makes Bosnian and Kazakh languages worth sitting up to note? Ivan Lukavsky of Moravia Worldwide has written about these languages in the March issue of Multilingual magazine, noting that while there are “different drivers for the growth of these languages, and each exists in a different context, ... they certainly share some issues associated with their rapid development.”

In the case of Bosnia, the country is populated mainly by Bosniaks, ethnic Croats, and ethnic Serbs, each with their own linguistic differences. While the languages have a lot of overlap - similar to the way the languages spoken in Australian, Britain, Jamaica, the US, and India are all English but with sufficient variances to create humor and sometimes havoc - the languages within Bosnia are also dissimilar enough to create practical and political translation realities. Also, with the separation of Montenegro, the possibility that Montenegrin will become another recognized language is a distinct possibility.

In Khazakstan, a movement is afoot to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, following in the footsteps of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, whose languages are in the same language group as Kazakh, and who used Cyrillic script when they were part of the Soviet Union.  Despite the fact that Russian is the official language, there is a push to popularize Kazakh, making localization into Latin-character Kazakh a near-future option.

Jon Ritzdorf of Moravia Worldwide will present Globalization Issues with Medical Device Embedded Systems at Documentation and Training Life Sciences 2008. Ritzdorf will examine how medical devices that run on embedded systems can be developed in ways that make them ready for global users, so that they support the language scripts, formats, and conventions of international locales.