Simplified English for software industry

[Jeff ALLEN <jeff -at- ELDA -dot- FR>]

Hi Jill, Poppy and other TECHWR-Listers,

I thought I would join in the discussion now that I have a couple of
minutes. I was busy on some very important proposals last week and could
not reply to points made by Jill and Poppy on the topic of Simplified
English (SE) and porting it to the software industry.  I will not address
everything, but just a few points.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>     "Do a test" sounds terrible to me. It is not as
>     direct or as active-voice as "Test the..."  Any English speaker knows
>     about the imperative form, and that rarely, if ever, do we begin a
>     sentence with a singular noun. In other words, when would we begin a
>     sentence with Test if it were NOT a verb?

Jeff adds: We need to remember that sentences are not always full, complete
sentences with a subject, a verb, and accompanying objects or phrases.

If SE as a controlled language were ported to the radio and broadcast
industry (and this has been considered), the singular form "test" could be
used in a title or subtitle (considered to be sentence level units in many
workflow systems) as in:

"Test of the American Broadcast System"

coming from the familar broadcast warning in the US where the person says
"This is a test of the ....." with that terrible drowning sound for about
30-60 seconds.

Granted, a native English speaker would understand "test" to be a sentence
initial noun in this case, but we also need to remember that there are
several companies and institutions that are integrating SE into larger
translation workflow systems (even if SE was not originally designed for
translation).  The computer is not always as intelligent as a human with
the disambiguation process.  I would say that "test" could probably be
disambiguated automatically by collocations like "test the", "test a",
"test some" that indicate it as a verb and "test of", "test with" etc that
indicate it is as a noun.  However, there are cases where a noun and verb
of the same lexical form can be extremely ambiguous for an automatic
translation system.  For example:

"Handle with care" in an isolated form.  For a human being, and especially
a native English speaker, it is quite clear that this means:

* "handle" = (verb) "to conduct a manual process by which a human needs to
directly or indirectly move an object from one place to another"
* "with care" = prepositional phrase meaning to pay close attention to.

Yet for a computer that must analyze an isolated sentence of this sort, it
could also interpret "handle with care" as:

* "handle" = (noun) a handle of a machine
* "with" = preposition indicating that the first object contains a second
object  (for ex.  "shirt with buttons" or "jeans with zipper").
* "care" = also means "pay attention to".

In the context of automatic translation, the computer is not always trying
to analyze the semantic truth behind the syntactic form, so it would be
possible to end up with an automatically translated sentences of "handle
with care" that could render a meaning something like "a handle that
contains care".  I know that this sounds quite odd, and that a human
translator would most likely not make such a mistake, but a lot of
controlled languages (many of them established on the basis of SE as Poppy
indicated) are formed with the idea of improving multilingual documentation
systems.   "handle" is a good example of a verbal-nominal form that can be
completely ambiguous and for which the syntactic context does not always
help the computer.  In the case of "test", there are some disambiguation
sequences that could be programmed in.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>I cannot think of an
>     instance. Tests, plural, can begin a sentence, but English speakers
>    should know that Tests, plural, is a noun. There is no ambiguity, even
>    for translators, that I can see. A translator's job is to know the
>     accepted construction of a sentence in the language s/he is
>     translating from or to.

Jeff adds: And that is what we are trying to do with automatic translation
systems too, but we have not quite yet perfected the process.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>     In fact, "Do" as a verb is vague,

Jeff adds: I refer to English "make" and "do" as Vague Verbs in my
controlled language teaching courses.  Actually, there is a entire set of
vague verbs that I mention in the courses.  I have tons of examples of this
problem of vague verbs. Note, the vague verbs are sometimes the same (that
is, they are semantically similar) across different languages.   I have
done some language acquisition research on this point.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>     In Rule 2.2, discussing using hyphens to clarify noun clusters, SE
>     actually recommends the following phrase.
>     Main-gear inboard-door retraction-winch handle
>
>     I can see how hyphens help clarify noun clusters, but writers should
>     avoid having three in a row - I laughed when I read that one.

Jeff adds: But in a global and/or translation context where not all readers
of the text will be native speakers (for ex. non-native speaking mechanics
and technicians or very proficient, but non-native, English-speaking
translators), the hyphens are very helpful.   I have seen several sets of
long technical terms (though I cannot remember the examples off-hand) that
were quite ambiguous in the heavy-machinery sector.  Multiple hyphens
clarified the context.  Sure, we do not want to go overboard with
hyphenation, but it should be used to help distinguish between objects that
are in contrast, opposition, etc.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>I will comment,
>     however, that if easy translation is one goal, SE might want to add
>     guidelines on the use of ambiguous words like "once" or "since" - in
>     tech writing we say "when" or "after", or "because", respectively.

Jeff adds: Yes, the time-related conjunctions are very important to
constrain semantically.  "When" has multiple meanings, and this is
frustrating for the use of automatic translation systems.

Jill Clay <JILL_CLAY -at- NON-HP-PALOALTO-OM8 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM> wrote:
>and I should think it would "do a
>     disservice" to translators to change "Test the ..." to "Do a test..."

Jeff adds: As for the "do a test" vs. "perform a test" problem in SE (since
perform cannot be used as a verb, but we did allow it in Caterpillar
Technical English as a verb), what is the possibility of saying "conduct a
test" in SE?   My SE manual is somewhere at the bottom of a box at home, so
I cannot consult it.

Best,

Jeff
(former trainer of controlled language tech writing and tech translation at
Caterpillar)

=================================================
Jeff ALLEN - Technical Manager/Directeur Technique
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)  &
European Language resources - Distribution Agency (ELDA)
(Agence Europe'enne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques)
55, rue Brillat-Savarin
75013   Paris   FRANCE
Tel: (+33) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) 1.43.13.33.30
mailto:jeff -at- elda -dot- fr
http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=