Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Scheme in Linguistics and Translation

Programme Characteristics

• Leveraging the combined strengths of linguistics and translation to create a synergy of theories, applications and professional training.
• Capitalising on advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) to prepare language professionals for digital applications across a wide range of language-related professions (e.g., machine translation/interpreting and automatic tools for text and speech processing).

Medium of Instruction

English and Chinese*

* Putonghua by default; Cantonese only used in Elective Subjects on the Cantonese language.

Programme Aims

• To train language and knowledge professionals for our knowledge-rich and highly connected world, with a special focus on biliteracy and trilingual proficiency.
• To endow our graduates with highly sophisticated communication skills, especially the following: cultural and domain sensitivity in intercultural and corporate communication; inter-personal skills and empathy in both face-to-face communication and over digital media; and the technological know-how to master current and future new media.
• To equip our graduates with a general knowledge of the underlying concepts and profession-specific literacy and skills requirements in linguistics, speech sciences, translation and interpreting, and corporate communication.
• To equip our graduates with competence in handling data analytics for language content and with the ability to extract and distil relevant trends and information from big linguistic data sets to meet the needs of society.

Credit Requirements

The overall credit requirements for BALT are as follows:

Academic pathways for students to pursue:

• Major and Minor/free Electives
• Single Discipline Major
• Double Major (BALT and BAEAL)

Secondary Major Details

The option of a Secondary Major in AI and Data Analytics is available to the students of BA (Hons) in Linguistics and Translation.

Features

Students who pursue this pathway will complete 75 academic credits + 3 training credits for the Primary Major (BALT) and 36 credits for the Secondary Major (AIDA). Certain credits including the Integrated Capstone Project can be double-counted between the Primary and Secondary Majors. The list of compulsory and elective subjects for the Primary Major (BALT) is almost the same as the existing programme BALT. The only difference is in the capstone project: students will complete an integrated capstone project (involving both BALT and AIDA) instead of the BALT regular capstone. The minimum credit requirement of BALT + AIDA is at least 132 credits.

BALT curriculum focuses on the analysis of linguistic structures (speech sounds, words, sentences, and discourses in both Chinese and English), language processing by humans, and multiple functions of language in society. The curriculum also includes computer programming, text processing, computational linguistics, and language data analytics. This creates a natural connection with the AIDA curriculum. By extending BALT students’ exposure to include a cluster of more specialized subjects on IT and big data analytics, they will be in a privileged position to apply linguistic and data analytics skills in an increasingly bilingual professional workplace, thus enhancing their employability.

An important learning outcome of BALT is to train the students with empirical data analysis tools and computational methods. In the digital era, linguistic and IT-mediated skill sets are evidently in great demand. BALT graduates can make meaningful contributions to various sectors in society (e.g. business, marketing, journalism and media, education, healthcare, public services, academic research) by analyzing social sentiments, spotting emergent trends, generating predictions, and providing corpus-based insights to facilitate corporate and administrative decision-making.

Remarks

There is no professional accreditation for BALT+AIDA.

With their strong language proficiency and competence in technology, BALT graduates can pursue careers in various professions, local and overseas, including but not limited to the following:

• Linguistic research
• Speech sciences+
• Translation/interpreting
• Administration and management
• Education
• Corporate communication
• Language data analysis
• Digital/social media content creation and editing
• Social/cultural analysis
• Editing and publishing
• Civil service
• Marketing and sales

+ Postgraduate study such as the Master of Speech Therapy in CBS or other recognised programmes must be pursued to become a registered speech therapist in Hong Kong.