How to treat GUI Options in IT Technical Texts for Authoring and Machine Translation

Abstract

This paper focuses on one aspect of controlled authoring in a localization and Machine-Translation context: the treatment of GUI options, which abound in the procedural sections of IT technical documentation. GUI options are technical terms that refer to the Software User Interface. The length and complexity of GUI options is a major problem for numerous NLP tasks, including MT. GUI options which have not been identified by NLP applications typically lead to erroneous analyses of sentences. However, few authors have focused on the identification and tagging of GUI options in IT documentation. This paper delineates an approach based on a controlled language checker that benefits both the human authoring process and Machine Translation.