The popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice, will support two constructed (made-up) languages from early February with the launch of LibreOffice 7.3. The two languages are Star Trek’s Klingon – the language of the Klingons, and Interslavic, a language that"s supposed to bridge the language gap between Slavic languages such as Russian and Polish.
With LibreOffice mainly being funded by donations, some of its benefactors will be no doubt wondering if their money isn’t being wasted on the implementation of these languages due to the fact that they have a tiny number of speakers. In response to this concern, The Document Foundation (which runs LibreOffice) said that it’s important to remember the community develops the suite so individual contributors can work on items that are important to them, therefore, an individual working on a Klingon translation doesn"t stop the wider project from working on other important tasks.
Commenting on the inclusion of the new languages, The Document Foundation said:
“Even if Klingon and Interslavic support sounds like a novelty, it shows how versatile free and open source software is. ... LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages, and we’d like to expand that even further. The more languages the better, especially if we can help to boost IT skills in places which don’t otherwise have software in their native languages!”
According to the release notes for LibreOffice 7.3, the new language support was added by Eike Rathke who currently works at Red Hat which is just one of the many companies that contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice and benefit from the software in return.