MASTER’S DEGREE IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND COMMUNICATION IN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND PROCESSING (UNED)

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

In today’s professional world it is essential to be a competent and frequent user of ICTs in most professional positions, which are being filled by university graduates in languages: teaching, research, publishing, translation, lexicography, terminology, information and document management, corpus, design and coordination of language projects, organisation and culture management etc. The completion of this master’s degree will enable students, who are specialists in one or several languages, to develop specific technological skills to work efficiently and competitively in educational and civic institutions (teaching languages or other subjects in a second language, organising and coordinating language projects), at publishing and media companies (translating texts, proofreading and editing, documentation, developing, publishing and writing manuals, textbooks and multimedia materials), in broadcast media (audiovisual translation, subtitling and dubbing), in libraries and documentation centres (processing information, managing dissemination channels, searching and cataloguing printed and electronic texts), at cultural services agencies (in intercultural mediation, international cooperation and management of cultural products and services, designing cultural policies and promoting initiatives of such kind), in language services departments at companies, associations and institutions in general (coordinating and monitoring the standards of language use, drafting and disseminating internal manuals).

Apart from career prospects, at the end of this master’s degree students may start an academic research career, which would begin with the completion of a doctoral dissertation on any of the topics of natural language processing, computational linguistics, CLIL, CALL, MALL, etc., covered in their different subjects, depending on the students’ own area of interest. Depending on their chosen subject, the dissertation would be supervised by a member of the teaching staff. Finally, professional and research objectives of the master’s degree may coalesce in certain activities in educational centres (as teacher and researcher), documentation centres (as researchers in philology, linguistics and documentation), and the language industry in general (as developers of corpus and information search tools, computational lexicographers and terminologists, language project managers, ICT centre coordinators, etc.).

Finally, it should be added that although the design of this master’s degree focuses on the linguistic and technological development of the students, it does not cease to be humanistic. All the subjects aim to contribute in some way to disseminating the ethical values of humanism in its broadest sense and fostering a culture where not only linguistic and technological progress has priority, but also the fundamental rights of people and equal opportunities without discrimination. In addition, all subjects have the underlying purpose to stimulate the habit of reflection and reasoning, intercultural communication, argumentation based on respect and tolerance, the interpretation and free criticism of methods, models and theory.