Are Style Guides Controlled Languages? The Case of Koenig & Bauer AG
This addresses the challenge of enhancing technical documentation authoring for industrial companies, but it appears incremental as it applies existing concepts to a specific case.
The paper tackles the problem of improving the authoring process for technical documentation at Koenig & Bauer AG, demonstrating how style guides can evolve from non-linguistic considerations into precise rules and exploring whether these constitute a controlled language.
Controlled natural languages for industrial application are often regarded as a response to the challenges of translation and multilingual communication. This paper presents a quite different approach taken by Koenig & Bauer AG, where the main goal was the improvement of the authoring process for technical documentation. Most importantly, this paper explores the notion of a controlled language and demonstrates how style guides can emerge from non-linguistic considerations. Moreover, it shows the transition from loose language recommendations into precise and prescriptive rules and investigates whether such rules can be regarded as a full-fledged controlled language.