Language, Technology, and Society

• Accessible to a wide audience; jargon-free
• Combines original research with a wide-ranging overview of work in many fields
• Illuminates the inner workings of complex technologies, such as speech recognition and machine translation systems

Readership: All those interested in how language technology has shaped our lives

Richard Sproat, Oregon Health and Science University

"Richard Sproat's canvas is exceptionally broad, as befits the subject, ranging from the clay tokens of ancient Mesopotamia and the later Egyptian hieroglyphs, through decipherment, pseudo-decipherment and literacy, to the computerization of the Chinese script and the development of machine translation. His expertise, especially in computing, is evident; his examples are varied, apposite and accessible; and his style is lucid, measured and often amusing. Language, Technology, and Society is clearly the fruit of long reflection by the author, and this shows on every page. " - Andrew Robinson, author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction

"Steven Poole's non-fiction choice in The Guardian"

1: Preliminaries
2: Writing as a Language Technology
3: How Writing Represents Language
4: Decipherment
5: Writing, Literacy, and Society
6: history
7: Modern Speech Technology
8: Language Processing and Translation
9: The Future