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Given the success of Simplified Technical English (STE) and its adaptability, it was over time applied to various document types, and increasingly also in other (mainly technical) industries. In the aerospace and defence industries, safety, efficiency and readability are the main considerations for the use of STE. In many other industries, such as machinery, automotive, electronics, IT and medical equipment, another important consideration is to save on translation cost without compromising on translation quality.

Simplified Technical English (STE) rules describe sound writing practices

STE is an aerospace standard, or at least it started off as an aerospace standard. That having been said, out of those 65 writing rules, I couldn’t name a single one that is aerospace-specific. Take these STE rules for example:

1. Do not make long sentences (maximum 20 words for procedures, 25 words for descriptive text).
2. Do not use clusters of more than 3 nouns.
3. Only use simple verb tenses.
4. When you give an instruction, use the imperative/command form of the verb.

Well, most of us will have seen this kind of rules. We don’t like long sentences and Simplified Technical English tells us that for procedures or tasks there should be no more than 20 words in one sentence. For descriptive text we are allowed some more flexibility, and we need that, we have up to 25 words. Also English is a rather problematic language in that it allows us to just put any number of nouns into a cluster, and this makes it very difficult at times to see the relationship between the nouns in those clusters. For example ‘left engine switch’ can already be confusing, and difficult to understand, difficult to accurately translate.

If I say ‘left engine switch’, does that mean it is the switch for the left engine, or is it the left switch for a specific engine? So, do ‘left’ and ‘switch’ or ‘left’ and ‘engine’ belong together most directly?

In this case, the use of prepositions such as ‘of’, or ‘for’ will help to clarify this. Take the example of the ‘runway light connection resistance calibration‘. While it is common to see noun clusters made from several words  in technical language, clusters that are too long will mean that your reader has to make his way through four modifying words to reach the main noun.

For technical writing professionals who are considering the option of implementing Simplified Technical English (STE) in their organisation, you now see that many of the STE writing principles are very valid for all technical documentation purposes.

One STE rule that can transform your technical writing skills

One valuable STE rule is the rule that I would consider the most important one: Only use approved words. This is where Simplified Technical English becomes really different from corporate style guides. Why? Because the STE language standard includes a core vocabulary (or general dictionary) of around 930 words that will let you write just about everything that you need for technical documentation, even for procedural information in general.

We find that roughly 95% of the words in the STE general dictionary can be easily adapted even for general banking, like financial aspects of banking information. The set-up of the STE standard is such that you can very easily adapt the STE to suit and cover your specific needs. It mainly entails additions to the dictionary which are customarily made, even for aerospace customers. Because even within aerospace, there is a lot of variation when it comes to vocabulary, terminology, especially when dealing with different systems on board an aircraft.

As a very simple example, one of our customers actually makes coffee machines. Now coffee machines seem to have nothing to do with aircraft. However, I think 98% of passenger aircraft actually have coffee machines on board, and they need their documentation in Simplified Technical English.

Now if this coffee machine happens to be in an office, or in a medical practitioner’s practice, or in a cafeteria, would it really require documentation that is all that different from the documentation on board an aircraft? No.. If anything at all, we just restrict the rules a little bit less. Aerospace tends to be a little bit more restrictive, we just relax the rules a little bit for other industries.

In this year’s economic slowdown, training budgets are often the first to shrink, if not, put on hold, as companies try to reduce costs in all areas. Unfortunately, businesses also start to see a direct impact on their level of competitiveness and overall success when they do not continue to invest in employee training.

Thankfully, many quality assurance (QA) managers know about the importance of documentation and the importance of standards to support their documentation.

QA managers recognise that to continue to deliver high quality services and products to their customers, their companies cannot stop investing in competence development to improve their employees’ skills, knowledge and career confidence. Motivated employees suggest a more promising outlook for any business’ future.

Reasons for acquiring Simplified Technical English (STE) writing skills as a professional asset

English happens to be a very rich language, meaning that, amongst other things, it has a huge vocabulary.

English has about three times as many words as French or German. However, in French or German you can say just the same things that you can say in English.

This implies that English has redundant or ambiguous words. Also, English grammar is a problem even for most native English speakers, and it can be highly confusing especially to people who speak English as a second language. Therefore, we want to try and do away with this huge, unnecessary part of the vocabulary, and we want to simplify grammar to what is essential to getting our message across.

Keeping your technical content concise yet precise – the basic principles of STE

1) Only use one word for one function, procedure or object.

2) Use each word in the ASD-STE100 dictionary based on its defined meaning and specific part of speech only.

3)Write only one instruction per sentence.

Most importantly, Simplified English is unique because this is a very balanced, and rather complete set of rules. It was not based on the personal preferences of just one or two people, but a whole committee that has developed this standard.

Working with great partners from all over the world to bring you high quality training workshop events

Organised in collaboration with partners in Holland, Germany, Austria, India and Russia, our global Simplified Technical English (STE) workshops deliver high-quality training content that allows participants to create technical content in STE with great ease and 100% confidence.

Training offers in spring

Our STE training workshops equip technical communication professionals with the skills and confidence to create user-friendly and readable technical documentation, making it easier to translate, or doing away with the need for translations altogether. Refer to our STE training schedule below:

1. Singapore, 3 – 4 March 2016
2. Hyderabad & Bangalore, India, 10 – 15 March 2016
3. Berlin, Germany, 4 – 5 April 2016
4. Tiel, the Netherlands, 21 – 22 April 2016
5. Helsinki, Finland, 9 – 10 May 2016
6. St Petersburg, Russia, 19 – 20 May 2016

For more information on Shufrans’ training courses, please refer to our training page. Shufrans also offers customised ASD-STE100 training solutions that are tailored to meet your specific business requirements. These training workshops are usually conducted on-site at the customer’s premises or at our offices in Singapore.

To register for one of our open STE training classes, call +65 9777 4730 or email register@shufrans-techdocs.com.

Why standardise?

Standardisation is widely practised in manufacturing to realise economy of scale at the product level. Why not apply standardisation to documentation?

Data standardisation is cost saving by common sense. Injuries, losses and costly legal liabilities can occur as a result of unclear documentation and ambiguous translations. Just like the manufacturing industry makes use of standard components in their product assembly line, Simplified Technical English uses standard vocabulary in the ASD-STE100 specification and consistent industry-/product specific terminology to create documentation.

The borrowed concept of standardisation in the engineering world when translated into the technical documentation industry is based on standardised terminology and simple grammar rules.

The latter for instance, promotes the use of the active voice and simple present tense to clearly identify the doer of a particular action so as to avoid miscommunication and ambiguous translations during the localisation process. In a nutshell, we can draw a parallel between grammar rules and SOPs that both share a common purpose in streamlining processes in a straightforward and objective manner.

What is STE, and how does STE differ from Standard English and how do I know if this is right for my industry?

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is an international standard that helps to make technical documentation easy to understand. Simplified Technical English standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting users control their specific terminology. Although Simplified Technical English originates from the aerospace and defence industries, it can easily be customised and applied to any other industry, including machinery, automotive, electronics, IT and medical equipment. Major manufacturers and the S1000D standard require the use of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

Simplified Technical English pays for itself

Our customer is a manufacturer of mobile X-ray based imaging solutions. They created an operator manual and a service manual in Standard English. This manual is to be translated into 7 other languages.

Before using Simplified English, the manuals had a total word count of 67,300 words. The number of pages was 454. In Simplified English, the word count came down to 49,600 words. The page count was reduced to 406.

Text in Simplified Technical English is easier to understand and may not even require translation. Where translation is needed, Simplified Technical English helps to drastically reduce translation cost and time-to-market, as it effectively eliminates redundant words and improves consistency.

The company thus saves almost EUR 21,000 or 35% on the translation of these manuals. For subsequent manuals, the savings would increase further thanks to better re-use and yield from translation memory.

With the ever increasing number of languages that companies need to deal with, these savings add up quickly. As content in Simplified Technical English is easier to validate, technical writers will be more productive, and fewer iterations and less rework will be required.

For this reason, the time-to-market is reduced by a similar percentage.

Editorial note: Based on feedback from readers, we would like to clarify that the cost reduction above is based on statistics from standard commercial memory tools, i.e. re-use on the sentence (segment level). This is brought by a combination of consistent style, vocabulary and terminology.  

Simplified Technical English as part of your content strategy

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ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language that is used to write technical manuals in such a way that they can be more easily understood by an international audience. To put it across plainly, STE is a form of controlled language that is guided by 53 technical writing rules that were put together by a committee of linguists, engineers, and manufacturers who established over the years that these writing rules made sense and allowed them to re-write any of their existing documentation based on these rules, making their documentation easier to understand, while maintaining accuracy, safety, and validity.

Develop, deploy, and deliver documentation with STE

The STE specification also includes a core vocabulary of around 930 approved words and 1500 non-approved words that let technical authors write just about everything that they need for for procedural and descriptive texts. Therefore, the use of approved words, compliance with the standard, and a language quality checker tool to complement your content strategy efforts is akin to pooling your most valuable resources where people, internal processes, and innovative technologies become more aligned.

The role of technical authors and technical documentation managers

Technical writers are the go-between for subject-matter-experts (SMEs), engineers, designers and the end-users of documentation. Consequently, the responsibility of creating effective documentation falls on technical authors who will then endeavour to send out a clear, unambiguous, and user-friendly message about their products and line of services.

At the level of global information management, technical writing professionals should consider short-term tactics and longer-term strategies to overcome the following:

• An ever-increasing volume of words to write and translate
• Snowballing translation and documentation management costs
• Overlapping information across different versions of similar document types
• Low comprehension levels for the English language jargon.

STE in practice

If this is your first time hearing about STE, the example that follows will hopefully shed more light on the principles and best practices that govern good STE writing. Here is an original piece of text presented in standard English writing:

THE SYNTHETIC LUBRICATING OIL USED IN THIS ENGINE CONTAINS ADDITIVES WHICH, IF ALLOWED TO COME INTO CONTACT WITH THE SKIN FOR PROLONGED PERIODS, CAN BE TOXIC THROUGH ABSORPTION.

And here it is again in STE:

THE OIL IS POISONOUS. DO NOT GET THE ENGINE OIL ON YOUR SKIN.  IT CAN GO THROUGH YOUR SKIN AND INTO YOUR BODY.

Making the comparison between the two types of writing above, you will see that the original writing is rather cumbersome in expression. It is also very likely that the person reading this sentence will have difficulties following the writer’s line of thought because of the longer sentence length and unnecessary information included. In contrast, the text written in STE is much more to the point and simply distils what is pertinent to the person doing this work:

1. The oil is poisonous.
2. I must always be careful not to touch oil without protection.

From this example, STE shows us that warnings and cautions must always start with a simple and clear command that is usually substantiated by a reasoning that comes before or after.  A command informs the user about the precautionary measures to take to avoid danger. Presenting information as if it were a general comment in the original writing obscures the importance of the message and is not specific enough.

What customers are saying.. | NIMR Automotive

Thuraya Al Mehrzi, Production Engineer, NIMR Automotive
“Shumin gave a good introduction to Simplified Technical English. Instead of writing long sentences that are difficult to read, I prefer the STE rule of presenting long sentences in a list that makes it much easier to understand the work that is required to be completed. The STE exercises were pretty engaging, and this is particularly so for day 2 of the rewriting workshop that gave the team a lot of insight into our documentation. Trainees also had the opportunity to replace many unapproved standard English words with STE ones that helped us better appreciate the application of STE rules in a real-world context. This is a training that I have rated 10/10 for.”

Nour Bazuhair, Engineer Trainee, NIMR Automotive “The introduction to Simplified Technical English (STE) was simple to follow and understand. Rule 1.4 to use only the approved forms of verbs and adjectives from the STE dictionary is something that I appreciate very much. Applying the rules faithfully was a challenging albeit enjoyable process. There is a lot of good writing rules to learn here. I’ve found the exercises to be very useful for learning reinforcement, and they have helped me to apply STE rules in a more efficient manner and I’ve gained a much better understanding of STE as a result. Shumin’s training methodology is easy to follow, and she offers us great technical writing advice and has simplified the process for us. Every aspect of this training is a 10/10 for me.”

Abdel Alazeem Arafah, Service Coordinator, NIMR Automotive “This was a great course with very useful and practical knowledge for my work. Simplified Technical English (STE) encourages users to always refer to the approved list of verbs and nouns in the STE dictionary before writing their technical documentation. The active voice is also a very useful and powerful tool in sending loud and clear instructions to our users. Starting a warning or caution with a simple and clear command is also very crucial in my line of work. Shumin’s delivery of the training is highly organised, and she has been most patient with our comments, questions, and feedback the whole time.”

An innovative approach to consider for your global documentation landscape

Over the last three decades, STE has emerged as a rather important and universal standard for technical English. Predictably, as a result of language standardisation, STE helps us to achieve a number of benefits. Technical writers become more consistent on a word level. This starts with the simple fact that we are going to use the same word whenever we refer to the same thing, so that means an improved level of consistency and consequently quality improvements.

Where can I learn more about STE?

Shufrans TechDocs regularly hosts online training workshops for technical writers, SMEs, and engineers at different time zones for your convenience. To learn more about our diverse course offerings and workshop customisations that we can do for you and your global technical documentation team, speak to us today!