This report is about Software User Documentation. The writing style of technical documentation has a robust impact on readability, comprehensibility, and translatability into other languages. In an effort to facilitate comprehensibility and translation, the language utilized in software user documentation must be standardized. If the terminology and language rules are standardized and consistent, the time and cost of translation will be reduced. For this reason, controlled languages have been developed. Controlled languages are subsets of other languages, purposely limited by restricting the terminology and grammar that is allowed.The objective and goal of this dissertation is to investigate how utilizing a controlled language can improve comprehensibility and translatability of software user documentation written in English. To be able to reach our objective, we have performed a case study at IFS AB. We specify a number of research questions which help satisfy a few of the goals of IFS and, when generalized, fulfill the goal of this dissertation.
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
1.2 Goal
1.3 Case study at IFS
1.3.1 IFS AB
1.3.2 Research questions
1.4 Method
1.4.1 Literature study
1.4.2 Interviews
1.4.3 Alternative methods
1.5 Limitations
1.6 Document outline
1.7 Target group
1.8 Division of work
I Theoretical background
2 Comprehensibility and Readability
2.1 De nition of comprehensibility
2.1.1 Comprehensibility during the reading process
2.2 De nition of readability
2.2.1 Readable as Comprehensible
2.3 Factors that affect readability
2.3.1 Lexical level
2.3.2 Syntactic level
2.3.3 Semantic level
2.4 Comprehensibility measures
2.4.1 Comprehensibility on small versus large texts
2.5 Readability measures
2.5.1 The assessment test
2.5.2 The cloze procedure
2.5.3 The readability indexes
3 Translatability
3.1 The goal of translation
3.2 The translator’s comprehension
3.3 Target language independence
3.4 Semantic or communicative translation
3.5 Common translation problems
3.5.1 Lexical ambiguity
3.5.2 Syntactic ambiguity
3.5.3 Contextual ambiguity
3.5.4 Anaphora
3.6 Machine translation
3.6.1 Adapting to machine translation
3.6.2 Typical machine translation problems
3.7 Translation memories
3.8 Parameters of correspondence
3.9 Translatability measures
3.9.1 Study 1: Measuring general translatability
3.9.2 Study 2: Evaluating machine translatability
3.9.3 The BLEU method
4 Style guides for writing
4.1 De nition of a style guide
4.2 Bene ts of a style guide
4.3 Well-known style guides
4.3.1 Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publication
4.3.2 The Chicago Manual of Style
4.4 Plain Language
4.5 Style for technical writing
4.5.1 Instructions
4.5.2 Style for descriptive and explanatory writing
4.5.3 Sequences and warnings
4.5.4 Voice
4.5.5 Tense and mood
4.5.6 Contractions
4.5.7 Text functions
4.5.8 Syntactic cues
II Controlled languages
5 Introduction to controlled languages
5.1 Controlled language components
5.2 Sublanguages
5.3 The rst controlled language
5.4 Comprehensibility and readability of controlled languages
5.5 Translatability of controlled languages
5.6 Human-oriented and machine-oriented CL
5.7 Drawbacks of CLs
6 Terminology management
6.1 Terminology de nitions
6.2 Functions of terminology
6.3 One concept, one term
6.4 Structuring concepts
6.5 Term collection
6.6 Term creation
6.7 Term classification
6.8 Term translation
6.9 Term database design
6.9.1 General term elds
6.9.2 Fields for the translator
6.9.3 Grammatical elds
6.10 Controlled language vocabularies
7 Controlled language in industry
7.1 Caterpillar Fundamental English
7.2 Caterpillar Technical English
7.3 PACE
7.4 AECMA Simplified English
7.5 Ericsson English
7.6 Scania Swedish
7.7 EasyEnglish
7.8 Controlled language interaction
7.9 Introducing controlled languages
8 Controlled Language Tools
8.1 De nition of CL checkers
8.1.1 Red light/green light or interactive systems
8.1.2 Proscriptive or prescriptive approach
8.2 Common problems for CL checkers
8.3 CL checkers in industry
8.3.1 PACE Checker
8.3.2 The Boeing checkers
8.3.3 Scania Checker
8.3.4 EasyEnglish
8.3.5 Maxit
8.4 Authoring memories
8.5 Measures
III Case study
9 Documentation at IFS
9.1 IFS’ view on user assistance
9.2 IFS’ documentation structure
9.3 IFS’ document types
9.4 IFS’ documentation process
9.5 IFS Style and Writing Guide
9.6 Known problems in IFS documentation
9.6.1 Sentence length and complexity
9.6.2 Terminology
9.6.3 Other comprehensibility and translatability issues
10 IFS plans
10.1 IFS term database
10.1.1 Design
10.1.2 Extraction of terms
10.1.3 Term relations
10.2 Controlled languages at IFS
11 Rule suggestions
11.1 Approved words
11.2 Sentence length
11.3 Sentence complexity
11.4 Paragraph length
11.5 Sequences
11.6 Contractions
11.7 Compound terms
11.8 Articles
11.9 Verb forms
11.9.1 Tenses
11.9.2 Mood
11.9.3 Voice
11.9.4 Person
11.10Verbals
11.10.1Present participle
11.10.2Past participles
11.10.3Gerunds
11.10.4 Infinitives
11.11Phrasal verbs
11.12Ellipsis
11.13Negatives
12 Rule analysis
12.1 Choice of test documents
12.2 Rule applicability
12.2.1 Text analysis
12.2.2 Text rewriting
12.3 Rule effects
12.3.1 Theoretical analysis
12.3.2 Interviews
13 Rule modi cations
13.1 Removed rules
13.2 Modi ed rules
13.3 Tests of the new rule set
14 Implementation
14.1 IFS Development Environment
14.2 Our CL checker
14.2.1 The checker DLL
14.2.2 The sample application
14.2.3 The modi ed user interface
14.3 Implementation ideas
IV Conclusions…………
Source: Linköping University
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