Computational linguistics is considered as synonym of natural language processing. The main task of Computational linguistics is to construct programs in order to process words and texts in natural language. It is an interdisciplinary field.
The term, computational linguistics, was coined by David Hays, member of Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC). The final report of ALPAC proposed a new field called computational linguistics and machine translation should be considered as short-term engineering goal. This progression from machine translation to computational linguistics occurred in 1974.
A computer system is considered as linguistic if it uses some data or procedures that are language dependent and large. Therefore not every program that process natural language text is related to linguistics. Word processors, for example, process natural language text but they are not sufficiently language dependent.