You are here

Documentation you can trust (and understand)

An international manufacturer of elevators produces thousands of technical manuals every year. Translating them into forty different languages is extremely expensive since the language in the documents is often inconsistent. Such inconsistency is caused by the unsystematic use of the terms across different products and product generations and the different style of varying authors. There may be structural and lexical ambiguities in the texts that will be incorrectly translated, and the incorrect translation may even be transferred into yet another language. The translation memory of the company is not in efficient use because of its inability to handle all the linguistic variation present in the documents. The task of the actual translation is tricky, time-consuming, and expensive. And the resulting manuals may not be intelligible at all.

The language of the manuals should be simple and unambiguous for a successful translation.
There is a need for standardizing the language of the manufacturer's documents, but how?

Connexor offers a solution: the Controlled language checker. It is a writing aid for the authors of manuals. It provides simple guidelines to produce clear and simple English based on a customized set of rules. Controlled language means defining specific choices in grammar and the vocabulary of a language, unifying the terminology and filtering out technical jargon. As a result, the language is lexically and grammatically similar across the documents, unambiguous and highly usable. The use of the translation memory is optimized and the technical tools work better in such a well-formed and simple text. The cost of translation goes down and the manuals are comprehensible: the quality of the documentation soars. And the company saves millions.