Engineering in general means applying scientific
principles to design, construction and maintenance, and has traditionally
been related to such things as engines, cars, machines, buildings,
roads, communication systems and aircraft.
Language
Engineering means applying scientific principles to the design,
construction and maintenance of tools to help deal with information
that has been expressed in natural languages (the languages that
people use for communicating with one another). The underlying science
is linguistics - the study of how languages work. The tools can
be of varying kinds: many are computer systems to help with such
tasks as translation, language teaching, abstracting and indexing,
information extraction and so on, but language engineering also
leads to more intangible "tools" such as dictionaries
and thesauri, guidelines for authors, methods for teaching foreign
languages.
Anything which involves applying the science of
language to the solution of practical tasks is language engineering.
Machine translation and machine-aided translation
form a particularly important application of this discipline, dealing
with the production of computer systems for performing translation
or for supporting a human translator and also considering the processes
that a human translator performs in order to provide guidelines
and methodologies to help them. There are numerous other applications,
with computer-aided language learning becoming extremely significant.
In industry and professional life, the kind of
work which can be considered part of language engineering may be
done by a range of people with different expertise who may work
together and complement each other. The production of effective
tools to help with language-oriented tasks requires knowledge and
expertise in a number of areas, such as
-
detailed knowledge of individual languages
-
understanding of general properties
of language
-
computational realisation of linguistic
theories
-
properties of real language, with all
its ungrammatically and infelicity
Let’s consider the different profiles are
required in the language industries. Some people like to concentrate
on learning a foreign language, mastering it, being able to use
it effectively in any situation. They learn about linguistics so
as to be able to analyse their languages scientifically, and perhaps
compare them. They may be interested in translation skills and theory,
in writing, in communicating, in using computers to learn and process
language. Other people are interested in learning about languages
in general without gaining in-depth knowledge about any particular
one; they learn about general linguistic principles and use technological
tools to apply linguistic theories to a number of languages, or
just one. Others are fascinated by manipulating and processing language
by computer, and would like to have the technical and computational
skills to develop applications which do that automatically as well
as helping humans to do it. All of this knowledge and all these
people are needed in language engineering.
Author: UMIST
This article first appeared in Studying Abroad magazine
