meaning - "Communications In English for Engineers" — what does it exactly mean?

A lecture at my university is titled "Communications In English for Engineers".

Somebody from my year stated that 'communications' (in plural) relate to telecommunication and generally engineering/science discipline, rather than process of communicating between two or more entities (people/devices/anything else).

However, my brief Google research have not confirmed this. Most dictionaries queried about 'communications' in plural show a page for this term, but description seems more like one for 'communication'.

Could you then please explain:

1. What does 'communications' mean?


2. Is this term interchangeable with 'communication'?


3. Optionally: where does this difference (if there is one) come from?

Answer

Communications means both those things.

I'd guess it means the human variety due to the "In English" since the same protocols and techniques are used in telecommunications in English as in French, Italian, Mandarin, Klingon, Sindarin, etc. (bar some matters around character encoding, and even these days Unicode means we can mostly used the same technology and otherwise we all use the same underlying technology).

Double check with the college. I've heard some amusing anecdotes about course titles that were taken to mean one thing, but actually meant another thing, when both were perfectly valid ways of understanding the English. You may not want part of your academic year to bring you nothing but an anecdote that is amusing to someone else.