Dr. Menaka Sankaralingam started her career in 1997 as a Software Engineer Trainee in the Knowledge Based Computing Systems(KBCS) division of the erstwhile National Centre for Software Technology(NCST), a Central Government of India Research Organisation. Leveraging her strengths as a programmer, she transitioned to the corporate world and joined Novell, Inc in 1999.
However, realizing that she was driven by a love for languages and words, she quit her job to learn French from scratch in 2001. She completed the Diplôme Supérieur de Langues et Cultures Françaises – the highest level of French learning available at the Alliance Française before the introduction of DELF and DALF – at the Alliance Française of Bangalore in 2005. She followed this with a teacher’s training (Stage d’enseignant) at the Alliance Française of Madras in the same year.
While she was pursuing her French journey, she also studied at Annamalai University to obtain a Master’s degree in Linguistics, aiming to understand the fundamentals of language and language acquisition.
Armed with these two credentials, she was all set to start a career as a French teacher. However, life had other plans, as she encountered an irresistible opportunity.
Seizing this opportunity, she enrolled for a PhD in Computational Linguistics — the intersection of her two major interests — at the AU-KBC Research Centre at the MIT Campus of Anna University, Chennai, under the guidance of Dr. Sobha L in 2007. She spent seven years in academia to obtain her doctorate in “Automatic Identification and Extraction of Cause-Effect Relations in Tamil Discourse” (related research paper) in 2014.
Again in a dilemma between her strengths in languages and technology, she immersed herself in the WordPress ecosystem, freelancing and contracting for WordPress products. During this time, she also operated Plusminus’n’more, a book reviews website built on WordPress (The archived site was active between 2014 and 2017).
This eventually led to a career in e-commerce technologies at Prospress Inc. and subsequently at Automattic Inc. (the company behind the WordPress blogging platform, on which this site is proudly hosted). Currently, she works in the data team of the WooCommerce division at Automattic.
She tries to keep up with her command over the languages by doing different activities like blogging, reading, speaking with francophones, helping French learners, translating WordPress plugins to Tamil and so on.
In the future, she hopes to efficiently combine her passions to research and develop technology for language learning.
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.― Edgar A. Guest
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
― Richard P. Feynman