FAQs - Alec McAllister, Information Systems Services

You're the Multilingual Computing Co-ordinator. How many languages do you speak?
Almost one!

Hey, I do the jokes.
I'm serious. I simply make computers handle lots of languages I don't know.

But you do speak some languages?
I get by in a few, but my job rarely involves speaking them. I need to know how they work, especially the writing systems, to make computers handle them properly.

How many's "a few"?
I can read about a dozen, with a smattering of a few more.

Impressive.
Learning just to read a language is easy. Anyone can do it.

Are those all the languages taught here?
Heavens, no. The University teaches over 30 languages -- modern, ancient and medieval -- some rarely taught elsewhere in the UK. We've just added Indonesian and Thai.

Can the computers handle those?
Those two, yes. Others are harder. Berber, for instance ...

Isn't that a shooting jacket?
It's a North African language. Leeds is unusual in offering it. No-one's studying it this year, which is just as well, because I can't find a suitable font.

Do you also support languages that aren't taught here?
Our staff and students come from all over the world, and sometimes need to operate in their mother-tongues. In principle, any member of the University should be able to do any computing task in any language that they can reasonably ask for. And one or two unreasonable ones, too.

Is it just a matter of providing a font?
That's only the start. They need to be able to type text, format it, spellcheck, and scan printed text. All those depend on using the right encoding.

Encoding?
To a computer, every character is just a shape with a code-number. Sadly, different systems use different codes. If characters have incompatible codes, documents can't be exchanged or put on websites, because text from one computer appears garbled on another.

Isn't there a standard?
There is now. It's called Unicode, but even that doesn't yet cover all the non-modern languages we need: with no Visigoths on the committees, who decides how to encode the Visigothic "Z"? A few years ago, at the Leeds Medieval Congress, a couple of colleagues and I founded a group to help scholars encode such things.

So are medieval languages the most difficult for computers?
That honour belongs to Mongolian. This is the only UK university to teach Mongolian to degree level. The President of Mongolia is an alumnus; perhaps that's why he came here.

What's so special about Mongolian?
With recent political changes, Mongolia is reinstating a traditional script from Genghis Khan's era. That's a real computing challenge; letters join together, change shape according to context, and run in vertical columns, reading left to right. It's a very unusual combination.

But you've cracked it.
The technical side; Judith Nordby is our language expert, so I work to her requirements. I found a font, made a keyboard mapping, and worked out how to do the formatting. Admittedly, it took sixteen years ...

Since you came here?
Since I came back. I did an English degree here in 1971.

Too late for The Who.
Story of my life. Then I taught for nine years in a tough comprehensive before doing an MSc in IT and working in industry for a while. I came back here in 1990 as liaision between the Faculty of Arts and the forerunner of ISS.

Working on multilingual problems?
You could say that. We had an American mainframe that couldn't even do a pound sign.

Do you get any free time?
My family are my free time. We live in Garforth and have two daughters at primary school. I'm a school governor, and play in a barn dance band.

Your most Frequently Asked Question?
"You're the Multilingual Computing Co-ordinator. How many languages do you speak?"

Alec McAllister was talking to Simon Jenkins