This will be your guide to language technology, a discipline that has become unavoidable in today’s globalised multilingual world. The author explains how computers deal with various languages and will give you the knowledge required to use language technology responsibly. Areas dealt with include: text input and formatting in various languages; spelling and grammar checkers; online dictionaries and other language reference works; machine translation; multilingual websites and software localisation. This book is a computer manual and a multicultural awareness builder. Intended for general readers, this book is required reading for everybody who uses more than one language on their computers.

Michal Boleslav Měchura is a software engineer, originally from the Czech Republic. He worked for Fiontar in Dublin City University and for the New English-Irish Dictionary Project in Foras na Gaeilge. He builds and maintains the IT infrastructure on several language-technology projects including téarma.ie, logainm.ie, teanglann.ie and potafocal.com. He has a master’s degree in computational linguistics from Trinity College Dublin and had previously worked as a software localisation engineer for Microsoft. He is fluent in three human languages and countless programming ones. He is currently working on a PhD in the Czech Republic.