[techtalk] natural language vs. programming language

[Andrew Plumb]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, TiMoNeiRa wrote:
[deletia]
> I didn't become a translator after I got my B.Sc., I'm now doing the 
> engineering part of the translation of software, websites, multimedia, 
> etc... (localisation). There's this left/right hemisphere myth, and I 
> always thought it was an asset that I could go both ways, but lately in 
> searching for a job outside of localisation, I find I need justify myself. 
> People don't know what localisation is, what the tasks are, and only see 
> that I'm not a programmer but a linguist. So I've been thinking, maybe I 
> should learn some programming, find a job that will give me some 
> programming experience, take some programming courses, to finally get 'peer 
> recognition', but would this mean starting from scratch again, 
> career-wise..? I'm a senior localisation engineer now and a team lead, I 
> lead most of the projects that I work on and have quite a bit of 
> responsibility for 3 years of experience. I intend to start an MBA next year.
[rest deletia]

Hi Roberta,

On a somewhat related note, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the
O'Reilly "lex & yacc" book.  Given your background in both
linguistics/translation and programming I think you'll find it
particularly interesting.  I picked up a copy for myself a couple of weeks
back and have been finding it quite interesting; it's giving me some ideas
for some alternate shell environments and file systems...

Anything to do with information theory may be of interest too - it's a lot
heavier on the math & stats content than "regular" programming courses,
but IMHO well worth the effort.  Cryptography, compression and error
detection+correction algorithms fall under this category of study.  
Information theory is what makes sites/technology like Babelfish
(http://www.babelfish.org/) possible.

Enjoy!

Andrew.

-- 

Andrew Plumb, VE3SLG
mailto://andrew(at)plumb(dot)org
http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/
Today's High:  http://todayshigh.webhop.net/