An interactive support tool for writing multilingual manuals

Machine translation has been the dominant paradigm for automated multilingual document production. In this paradigm, a technical writer generates a source text, which is translated by the computer system into another language and then edited. One problem with machine translation, however, is that its output is typically constrained by the original text's style and language. Automatic language-generation systems, however, start with an underlying knowledge base that represents the text's content without dictating its language or style. However, most automatic systems are stand-alone tools, leaving technical writers out of the loop. The systems assume that an underlying knowledge base containing the necessary information is available or can be easily obtained. This is not necessarily the case, though, when producing instruction manuals. For example, the knowledge base required to produce instructions should contain user-oriented information. User-oriented documentation, which concerns the ways the product can help users achieve their goals, is more effective than documentation that focuses on the product. Only a technical writer can specify user-oriented information. It is thus prefer able to have a document-generation system that works with the writer. With this in mind, we developed Drafter, an interactive document drafting tool that can be integrated into the technical writers' working practices and that can automatically and simultaneously generate appropriately worded drafts in several languages. Drafter's current domain of application is software manuals.