The Slovenia Times

Multilingual web portal for Slovenian launched

Culture
The Franja multilingual portal of the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language. Photo: Screenshot

Fran, the Slovenian language web portal that allows users to browse 45 dictionaries for free, is celebrating its tenth anniversary with the launch of a multilingual version called Franja, which functions as a two-way dictionary between Slovenian and several other languages, from English to Romanian.

The fran.si portal is operated by the Fran Ramovš Institute of the Slovenian Language at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, whose head, Kozma Ahačič, described it as a success story at a ceremony on 16 October, International Dictionary Day.

A gateway for Slovenian language resources, the portal is being continuously expanded and updated. Today, it brings together 45 dictionaries, along with several corpora, various databases, an atlas, two services for questions about language, and 14 collections.

The portal attracts some 300,000 views a day and has recorded more than 450 million searches in a decade. It also serves as an entry point to the Franček portal for the youngest users and from now on for the multilingual portal franja.eu.

Named after Franja Tavčar (1868-1938), one of the first influential women politicians and the wife of writer and politician France Tavčar (1851-1923), the new portal allows browsing between 20 dictionaries to pair Slovenian dictionary entries with those in other languages, including Latin.

All dictionaries have been checked, but there are still some minor errors, which users can report using the suggest a correction button, Ahačič said. The portal allows for fast and smooth search of dictionary entries and also provides a link to the Fran portal.

Share:

More from Culture