Maria MacDonald is an experienced translator and qualified trainer of Simplified Technical English, or STE. She is the UK National Coordinator for STE and a member of the STE Maintenance Group for the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) and provides STE training within UKCeB. Here, Ms MacDonald explains why it pays to choose your words carefully when creating product and maintenance documentation. 

User and maintenance manuals written in Simplified Technical English (STE) will be in use for decades, for example on sophisticated defence equipment. Benefits include savings from reusability and the avoidance of financial and reputational costs arising from accidents and malpractices that may have ambiguous documentation as a factor. Consider this: most of the lifetime of an aircraft is spent flying and being maintained. So, after the aeronautical designers, engineers and constructors have done their job, the maintenance crews take over, keeping aircraft reliably airborne over many years, using and updating documentation. The equivalent happens for land and sea equipments.

Clear technical documentation, which includes user and maintenance manuals, instructions, service bulletins, warnings and cautions, is crucial. It must be accurate, unambiguous and intelligible. To achieve this, a specialised ‘controlled’ language – Simplified Technical English – is necessary. STE is the international lingua franca for documentation and there is an international standard for it.

ASD-STE100 is the ‘international specification for the preparation of maintenance documentation in a controlled language’ and the basis for STE. Initially developed to standardise the readability of maintenance documentation in the aircraft industry, ASD-STE100 is widely used across manufacturing sectors involving not only aerospace but other global products and services such as automotive, rail and marine.

Technical staff who have English as their second (or third) language face challenges when they have to read or write technical documentation. This is often underestimated by native and fluent English speakers. The principle for STE is one word for one function, procedure or object. There are rules to guide the writing process, explanations of how to use keywords and approved examples.  

The STE versions combine simpler sentence structures, the active voice and precision in the use of a ‘controlled’ vocabulary that avoids ambiguous words and phrases. 

What are the benefits of STE? Accidents, malfunctions and costly damage can often be traced back to faulty maintenance, which in turn may result from misinterpretation of ambiguous and unclear instructions. Documentation produced and updated to the ASD-STE100 specification reduces the chances of human error in both manufacture and maintenance and thereby prevents risks of injury. It also avoids damaging financial and reputational costs. STE saves time and costs as it facilitates reusability and data exchange.

So, control your language!