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Anthony Hernandez wondered: <<I've seen a few references to Simplified
English in reponse to the thread "Industry Standards." What is it?>>
Simplistically speaking, it's a specific approach to using a controlled
vocabulary whose current implementation was developed by the European
aerospace industry (details at
http://www.simplifiedenglish-aecma.org/).
The basic notion is that you won't always have the luxury of completely
or even partially translating and localizing a set of documentation,
and when that is the case, you need to produce a single English version
that will meet the needs of all your audience, including many readers
(often a majority) with English as a second (or third or worse)
language. In that case, you need a systematic approach to avoiding the
most common problems associated with English: the bewildering array of
potential syntax, enormous numbers of synonyms and homonyms, and
confusion between whether a word is acting (say) as a verb or noun.
On the face of it, it seems to be a reasonable approach, though fully
localized documentation is obviously better if you can manage it. And
I'm not convinced that SE produces English that will be inherently more
comprehensible than the English produced by a skilled editor who is
sensitive to the needs of an ESL audience. But those who have adopted
SE swear by it, so presumably it works well for them.
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