Proposed talk: Language Gotchas for Non-Linguists

[Judith Meyer]

Hey guys,

Nice meeting you last night. Here’s my talk proposal: Language Gotchas for Non-Linguists

Tentative outline:

• Why .split(“ “) and .join(“ “) are almost never correct. 
• Why you are greeting some of your customers incorrectly
  
• How to interpolate strings without having broken grammar
  
• Around the world in Unicode punctuation
  
• The evil that is <p dir=“auto”>
  
• Known pain points of Amazon / Google / DeepL translation APIs
  
• When to use AI, when to use a language algorithm 

I have always been passionate about both languages and programming, so I studied computational linguistics. My first Ruby on Rails job was in 2008. Since then I have worked on a wide variety of projects, from machine translation to Duolingo clones, and even some stereotypical Rails applications like social networks. Currently I work for CaptionHub.

Let me know if you’re interested in hearing about this.

Cheers,

Judith