Yandex Announces Plans to Add Kabardin-Cherkess and Karachay-Balkar Languages to Its Translation Function

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 1 – The Yandex news agency has announced that it is working to create an electronic translation system for the Kabardin-Cherkess and the Karachay-Balkar languages, a move that may undermine both Moscow’s efforts to divide the Circassian and Turkic languages and the two remaining binational republics, Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachayevo-Cherkessia.
    The fact that Yandex is talking about a common Kabardin-Cherkess language and a common Karachay-Balkar one will at a minimum encourage the Circassian and Turkic nations involved to see themselves as common peoples rather than as the Soviets insisted, a vision that may lead one or the other or both to step up efforts to redraw republic borders.
    That possibility is strongly suggested by Khachim Zheligashtov, head of a group called the Circassian Renaissance who says that a beta version of this translation service will go online soon (nazaccent.ru/content/43479-v-yandeks-perevodchik-dobavyat-kabardino-cherkesskij-i-karachaevo-balkarskij-yazyki/).
    While this effort currently enjoys the support of officials in the region, it may quickly lose the backing of Moscow once officials in the Kremlin recognize the problems they will be exacerbating if not creating by what is one of the more open challenges of the results of Stalin’s ethnic engineering to appear in the last few years.
    Indeed, once officials in Moscow take notice, it is likely that they will kill this project. But even if they do, the fact that it was announced and then may be put on hold by Moscow will have political consequences both for Circassian and for Turkic groups in the Caucasus and their larger co-ethnic groups beyond the borders of the former Soviet space.