<p>Understanding technical documentation is of vital importance, since instructions and descriptions are given about how technical products are used, maintained and repaired. Because of the increased economic globalization, more and more documentation is both written in English by non-native English writers, and delivered to non-native English readers. More and more documentation is also translated by means of computerized aids. In order to improve comprehension and translatability of technical documentation, controlled languages are created. Controlled languages are subsets of ordinary languages, but with restricted vocabularies and writing rules.</p><p>The aim of this report is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages for Swedish export companies to use Simplified Technical English (STE), which is a controlled language, for their technical documentation. In this work technical writers are asked about their opinions of STE. Additionally, technical texts written in traditional English are compared with versions written in STE, in order to find out whether texts written in a controlled language are easier to read or not. Within the comparison, the differences between the versions are discussed and a readability measurement is done. The measurement showed that readability in technical documentation is improved by using STE. The writers’ opinions are illuminated in three areas, which are: higher documentation quality, reduced translation costs and reduced production costs.</p>

Understanding technical documentation is of vital importance, since instructions and descriptions are given about how technical products are used, maintained and repaired. Because of the increased economic globalization, more and more documentation is both written in English by non-native English writers, and delivered to non-native English readers. More and more documentation is also translated by means of computerized aids. In order to improve comprehension and translatability of technical documentation, controlled languages are created. Controlled languages are subsets of ordinary languages, but with restricted vocabularies and writing rules. The aim of this report is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages for Swedish export companies to use Simplified Technical English (STE), which is a controlled language, for their technical documentation. In this work technical writers are asked about their opinions of STE. Additionally, technical texts written in traditional English are compared with versions written in STE, in order to find out whether texts written in a controlled language are easier to read or not. Within the comparison, the differences between the versions are discussed and a readability measurement is done. The measurement showed that readability in technical documentation is improved by using STE. The writers’ opinions are illuminated in three areas, which are: higher documentation quality, reduced translation costs and reduced production costs.

Textual duplicates can be hard to detect as they differ in words but have similar semantic meaning. At Etteplan, a technical documentation company, they have many writers that accidentally re-write existing instructions explaining procedures. These "duplicates" clutter the database. This is not desired because it is duplicate work. The condition of the database will only deteriorate as the company expands. This thesis attempts to map where the problem is worst, and also how to calculate how many duplicates there are. The corpus is small, but written in a controlled natural language called Simplified Technical English. The method uses document embeddings from doc2vec and clustering by use of HDBSCAN* and validation using Density-Based Clustering Validation index (DBCV), to chart the problems. A survey was sent out to try to determine a threshold value of when documents stop being duplicates, and then using this value, a theoretical duplicate count was calculated.