simplified technical english experts

simplified technical english experts

The Importance and Application of Simplified Technical English in Technical Communication

1. Introduction to Simplified Technical English

Simplified Technical English was developed in the aviation and aerospace industries. Many other industries around the world are using STE. For example, the automotive, chemical, defense, energy, information technology, machinery, medical and pharmaceutical, process control, and shipping industries. Today, many companies use STE in their documentation for various reasons. The two main objectives of STE are to reduce local ambiguity and improve the human safety factor. STE developed to permit a single standard to be used for all critical research, design, and manufacturing documentation for aerospace/aviation-related support.

The main difference between STE and its source, English, is the reduced word count and vocabulary of STE. The purpose of STE was to develop an international, simple, and unambiguous English for aerospace in flight and maintenance literature. The objective was not to make English men and women experts in a foreign language. Instead, the intent was to make experts in various technical fields international users, making it easier for them to learn and use a controlled version of the English language – in other words, controlled language. Controlled language, by its controlled structures, enables accuracy and therefore permits more successful machine translation when appropriate. The STE Dictionary provides terms of general usage in the specification (outside of its definitional usage) and is considered part of the information.

2. Key Principles and Guidelines of Simplified Technical English

STE is based on several principles and rules for writing. This section discusses the basic guidelines and key principles that form the backbone of Simplified Technical English. By following these rules, STE provides a set of clear guidelines aimed at producing more intelligible, less ambiguous technical documents in English. Companies across the globe who have used STE have experienced the benefits of structured documents in terms of offering increased linguistic consistency and clarity. Documents are more easily translated, so addressing readers whose first language is often English. These advantages and how they are brought about comprise the essential principles and guidelines discussed in this chapter.

STE is jointly a language and a set of writing directions. An individual word or a writer’s choice of vocabulary can affect the overall communication at the lexical level. But just as importantly, the organizational, or structural, aspects of writing, such as headings, paragraphs, sentence and clause structures, and punctuation, can all significantly influence the reader’s engagement with the information they are trying to process. As a highly residence-dependent and science-based language, according to STAR, this core structural guidance can help writers retrospectively plan their content to support their key messages and enhance clarity for a global engineering audience. This is particularly important for safety-critical writing where the communications are written with a wider readership in mind.

3. Benefits of Implementing Simplified Technical English in Technical Communication

The first and foremost benefit of a standardized language like Simplified Technical English is the facilitation of easier and faster comprehension of written instructions. This works in both ways. The document creators can be more certain that they have chosen words that can be more easily comprehended by their target audience. The document users, that is people at the workplace reading and trying to comprehend the document, can also read and understand the document content faster and hopefully with less misunderstandings when they are using a standardized language. This accelerates the communication process for both parties. When the technical document is easier to both read and understand, it also facilitates the translation process being executed faster and more successfully.

Another key benefit of Simplified Technical English, especially in the field of aviation, being used to communicate instructions in maintenance manuals for example, is the sense of urgency provided by the fact that the document user can more easily understand the essential maintenance tasks when problems occur.

The application of Simplified Technical English can also bring cost reduction that comes with several aspects of the entire instruction lifecycle management. When technical documents are written by engineers or other experienced staff, in the language that can easily be comprehended by the document users, less time will be required for such a staff member to explain the content of the document. Review process, which is a critical component for any type of technical document, will also be optimized as the content will be more deeply reviewed and understood for the best possible review results. Maintenance crew members or other local, non-native English-speaking staff can also benefit from implementation of Simplified Technical English as they will be able to use the documents to perform their tasks with more confidence and with the speed that can be achieved only by using standardized language. In this way, the probable service delays in cost can be prevented or minimized using a controlled language and safety will be supported.

Moreover, the company can meet the compliance requirements easily and more accurately while the fact that the documents comply with the mandatory standards of maintenance is ensured. This leaves no room for ambiguity and the likelihood of errors can be minimized. Once a company adopts Simplified Technical English, it should be in constant use as a previous generation of documents written with more complex language is still in use. This can lead to gradual language change and domain-specific terminology which might result in lack of interoperability among the distributed data.

4. Case Studies and Examples of Successful Implementation

Case 1: International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). TC 184. SC 4. WG 1 N 16. The problem: The documentation of manufacturing systems had many ambiguities which could create non-conformities in operation if they were not understood. The solution: The system documentation is now written exclusively in Simplified Technical English with the use of Microsoft Word’s grammar facility turned on. This greatly extends the capabilities of commercial and expensive machine-language translations. Reviewers no longer need to be experts at different levels of engineering because their standard language allows the checking of cross-checking quality. The staff of the developing companies are comfortable with the limited vocabulary and standard sentence structure. These clearer standards reduced material and delay costs in the supply of items in the United States of America and New Zealand compared with the previous documentation in other languages.

Case 2: Australian Department of Defence. The problem: The Defence Material Organisation produces weapon systems and equipment which are used and maintained by non-defence personnel. They were looking for cost savings in creating and writing documentation and obsolescence costs accrued when using or maintaining them. They invested US$200 per person to train 150 staff in Simplified Technical English. Their council of weapon systems was composed not only of five engineers who spoke English but also of twenty defence equipment users from other departments who stated which words matched or failed with a practical vocabulary. All customer documents have an established vocabulary, the layout of an app, pop-up pictures and one mouse click to put them, equipment descriptions, or maintenance in a secure server. Their newly written suggestions were published in up to months, reviewed by users and ready in one year instead of a three-year-old average. Their next project is to use these to create a 3D repository of all archived documents. They found that the defence units of the Belgian forces and its Australian industry located under the license restriction when using this standard did not notice any deficiencies in this use.

5. Challenges and Solutions in Adopting Simplified Technical English

The development, adoption, and smooth implementation of Simplified Technical English (STE) for the aerospace industry has been a successful and relatively straightforward process. These achievements were attained because the aerospace industry, which introduced the “Doculect,” has taken pride in developing thorough, comprehensive, and advanced maintenance documentation. However, many other professions and industries find that the STE Standard is difficult to adopt and would be more than satisfied to be able to “tweak” their documents to obtain similar benefits. With some STE implementations now more mature, we can begin to investigate why the pro-STE arguments (less translation cost, more effective training, fewer human errors, fewer accidents) are not compelling for many non-aerospace industries. At the same time, the reasons for contemporary non-adoption of STE become evident. This paper suggests a modified STE terminology and some guidelines to foster adoption of “not so simplified” technical English in various industries.

Technical communicators elsewhere in many industries, where controlled English helps to convey the intended message, have good reasons to be frustrated. Often, these technical communicators are closer to their organization’s “official controlled authors.” To transfer STE’s benefits beyond the aerospace community, we must do more than promote adoption of the justified technical characteristics, attributes, and merits design of every individual controlled language and parameters and definitions developed or yet to be developed. Measurements and recommendations will be developed into directives of presentation formats, general guidelines, specific industry developments, implications, readability studies based on production and training documents, sentence patterns, pre-translation software and tools for school and organization data tracking with still a hint of unbreakable inherited standard alliances between the entire controlled language concepts. These techniques will be directed to all people to be connected with the development of documents in the preliminary STE-style standard.