Presented at Documentation and Training East 2008 (October 29-November 1, 2008) by Brenda Huettner and Alison Huettner. Simplified Technical English (STE) is a success story for the aerospace industry. Will a simplified English work for your industry as well? This session explores the rationale behind simplified languages, their advantages and their perennial challenges. It surveys controlled languages from their beginnings to the offerings in today’s marketplace. The session will also cover the questions you need to ask to determine what’s right for your situation. Do you need to simplify? Can you adapt an existing language or lexicon? Or should you define your own set of rules and phrases? Where should you begin? What effort would be required?

1. Choosing the English That’s
Right for You
Simplified Technical English and Other Controlled
Languages
Brenda Huettner * Alison Huettner
October 31, 2008

2. The Big Picture
Controlled Languages
English
Swedish
GM CASL (Scania)
Plain Language
CLOUT
Caterpillar CTE
Attempto French
ASD- STE (Dassault)
Sun CE
Avaya ACE
German
(Siemens)

3. What is a controlled language?

4. Vocabulary

5. Grammar

6. Style

7. Advantages of Controlled Languages
More precision, less ambiguity
Easier to read and understand
More consistent source documentation across an
organization
Improved retrievability and reuse of information
More consistent translations
Less expensive human translation
Simpler and more accurate machine translation
Easier post-processing in general
Measurable index of document quality

8. Disadvantages of Controlled Languages
Time-consuming to create
Non-trivial to master
Some loss of nuance
Often less aesthetic
Difficult to enforce compliance
Difficult to evaluate

9. What considerations go into creating a
controlled language?

10. Who Is Your Audience?

11. How Elaborate Is Your Process?
Existing software
Size of organization
Workflow
Training burden
Number of documents
Translation component
Human or machine?

12. What Vocabulary Resources Exist?
CE development tools don’t come with the
technical vocabulary for your domain
Does your organization or your field have a
termbank or glossary?
In most cases you will build up the technical
vocabulary by text-mining your existing
documents

13. What Tools Can You Buy?
CE development software
Text-mining tools
Suggested basic vocabulary
May let you choose your grammar rules
CE checker software
Comprehensive check for vocabulary compliance
Various options for grammar checking
Translation memory software

14. Text Mining Tools
Extract from your documents a candidate list
of technical terms
Allow you to review and edit
Help you identify synonym groups and
choose the standard term
E.g., secondary brake, rather than parking brake
or emergency brake
Can create the foundation of authoring or
translation glossaries

15. Translating Technical Terminology
Add translations to your technical glossary
The one word ↔ one meaning goal is hard to
meet here
Multi-noun terms like message server
mailbox must be translated as units, as the
relationship among the nouns is arbitrary

16. The Two Basic Grammar Approaches
Specify constructions to be avoided
Prohibitions can be introduced gradually infinitives
Less training effort
Checking tends to be heuristic
Checker gives specific feedback
Specify the constructions that are allowed
Comprehensive system; not easy to modify
Requires more training effort
Checking involves a full parse
Checker feedback tells you only if it did or didn’t parse

17. Controlled English
vs. Software Checkers
Controlled English Software Checkers
A subset of English Check for compliance
vocabulary, grammar, with a set of rules
and style rules Vary in strictness
Often industry-specific Never 100% accurate
There are many variants of controlled English for
which no automated checker tool exists.

18. The Conformance Problem
The CE definition radically underspecifies the
form of acceptable text.
It may have passed the checker, but that doesn’t
guarantee that your sentence is clear and
informative!

19. The Authoring Problem
It’s hard for an author to determine whether a
sentence conforms to the controlled language
Most full-parse grammar checkers are red
light/green light
Non-conformance is often hard to fix
Worrying about controlled language can be
distracting and disruptive for authors

20. Translation Memory
Input need not be as tightly controlled as for
machine translation
Similar savings in human translation costs

21. That all sounds very difficult!
What controlled languages are
currently available?

22. Controlled English is a wheel reinvented many
times

23. Public CE Initiatives

24. Proprietary CE Initiatives

25. CE Research Projects
Attempto Controlled English (University of Zurich)
Controlled English to Logic Translation (Teknowledge)
Common Logic Controlled English (John Sowa)
First Order English (Oxford University)
ClearTalk (University of Ottawa)
Metalog (MIT)
Processable English (University of Sydney)
PROSPER (Universities of Glasgow, Cambridge, Edinburgh,
Karlsruhe, and Tubigen, with IFAD and Prover Technology)
KANT (Carnegie Mellon University)

26. How do you decide what’s right for you?

27. What are your output requirements?
Clarity? Brevity?
Reusability? Customizability?
Metrics? Quick turnaround?
Consistency across Integration with other
multiple authors? departments?
Multiple output Integration with other
formats? software?

28. Choosing software: www.electonline.org

29. Learn More:
Workshop on Controlled Natural Language
http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/cnl2009/
International Standard for Simplified
Technical English
http://www.asd-ste100.org/
U.S. Plain Language Initiative
http://www.plainlanguage.gov/