Controlling Language in an Industrial Application

We present an approach to Controlled Language (hereafter referred to as CL) which deviates to some extent from the traditional approaches and concepts of CL. This`Controlling Language' approach was developed and realized within the MULTILINT project. 1 The tools developed within this project are intended to support the technical authors of service and repair documentation of the automotive sector in producing high quality documentation in terms of readability, consistency and translatability. First, we will outline thèControlling approach'; then we will present the MULTILINT control tools in more detail. Experiences made during the validation phase at the industrial site are reported and, nally, the article concludes with an outlook to further activities in the domain of CL. 1 Controlling Language vs. Controlled Language It is a well known and indisputable fact within the CL community that the use of a Controlled Language (CL) in technical documentation leads to quality improvement with respect to readability, consistency and translatability. In existing CL applications such as AECMA SE (cf. Wojcik&Holmback(96)]), SECC (cf. Adriaens&Macken(95)]) and its commercial spin-oo LanTmaster, or in other commercially available checking tools like e.g. Clearcheck (cf. Hayes et al.(96)]), there are 1 MULTILINT is a research and development project sponsored by the German Ministry of Economy (grant number II C 7-00 3048/5). Project partners are IAI and BMW AG, Munich, as industrial partner and validation site. The project is scheduled for three years and will be nished by mid 1998.