DRAFTER: An Interactive Support Tool for Writing Multilingual Instructions

Multilingual instructions generation has been the object of many studies recently, motivated by the increased need to produce multilingual manuals coupled with the cost of technical writing and translating. These studies concentrate on the automatic generation of instructions, leaving technical writers out of the loop. In many cases, however, it is not possible to dispense with human intervention entirely; the system must be provided with portions of the a semantic knowledge base from which the instructions can be generated (if not, in fact, all of them). The results of our requirements analysis study confirm this view. In this paper, we describe DRAFTER, a support tool which we developed based on the results of our user requirement analysis.