MABLe: a Multi-lingual Authoring Tool for Business Letters

Introduction MABLe allows Spanish or Greek business letters writers with limited English to construct good quality, stylistically well formed British English letters. MABLe is a PC program, based on a domain dependant text grammar of fixed and variable phrases that together enforce linguistic cohesion. Interactions with the system are in the user's own language, and the constructed letter may be viewed in that language for sense checking. Our experience to date has shown that the approach it uses to machine aided translation, gives a sufficiently effective and flexible regime for the construction of genuine finished quality documents in the limited domain of business correspondence.