Innovation in Language Learning

This study aims to present a new controlled language able to provide an automatic translation of technical documents from Spanish into English and vice versa. To settle a set of linguistic rules helping in technical writing and consequently automatic translating, the Español Técnico Simplificado (ETS) was developed as a metalinguistic guidebook. It was focused on attention the particular structure of the English technical specification for the avionic documentation, i.e. the Simplified Technical English (officially known as ASD-STE100). It was identified how that specification can provide unambiguous technical text, useful for a reader who is not necessarily native language speaker.
Considering that an ad-hoc corpus was designed to extract linguistic information, the experimental design and method used to develop the ETS guidebook was essentially corpus-based. The results produced by the information extraction and the English specification imitation led to the development of a linguistic (controlled) method tailored to produce a technical document free from ambiguities. The ETS system relayed on the concept that readability and comprehensibility are conditions to be fulfilled by the controlled text. And, through its structure, the ETS was created to provide all the necessary tools to make that text unambiguous. Thus, as well as the English specification, the ETS guidebook is divided into two parts: Parte 1-Reglas de escritura concerning syntactical and stylistic rules, and Parte 2-Diccionario concerning a dictionary including a limited number of selected lemmas. All rules and lemmas were designed to obey the bijection principle of the Spanish linguistic signs.
The ETS has profound implications for future studies on technical writing and translation, but above all the ETS method can provide language education by Information Technology system. It is possible to make an automatic translation between two controlled languages, Español Técnico Simplificado <> Simplified Technical English, since the two controlled languages are equivalent to each other. And it is possible to learn and teach the ETS method by an e-learning system that could be specifically designed.