lingénieur

Lingénieur is a term used mainly in French-speaking tech contexts to describe professionals who integrate linguistic knowledge with software engineering to create language technologies. The word is a portmanteau of linguistics and ingénieur. While not an officially standardized title, lingénieurs are described as practitioners who bridge research in linguistics with the development of language-enabled systems.

Core activities include designing language resources (grammars, lexicons, annotation schemes), building and evaluating NLP components (parsers, taggers, recognition systems), implementing voice user interfaces and multilingual capabilities, and ensuring language accuracy and accessibility in software products. They may work in teams with data scientists, software engineers, and UX designers; they often contribute to corpus creation, data annotation, quality assurance, and ethical considerations such as bias and privacy.

Education and skills: degrees in linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science; strong programming (Python, Java, C++), knowledge of NLP frameworks (e.g., spaCy, NLTK, transformers), data annotation, phonetics, syntax/semantics, machine learning, speech processing. Familiarity with evaluation methodology and standards for language technologies; cross-cultural and multilingual awareness.

Industry status: the term is informal; actual job titles vary (computational linguist, NLP engineer, language engineer). The role is most common in tech companies building search, translation, voice assistants, or localization pipelines; in academia, related research areas include computational linguistics and language technology.

See also: computational linguistics, natural language processing, speech processing, localization engineering.