Legislative Drafting Guidelines: How Different Are They from Controlled Language Rules for Technical Writing?

Abstract

While human-oriented controlled languages developed and applied in the domain of technical documentation have received considerable attention, language control exerted in the process of legislative drafting has, until recently, gone relatively unnoticed by the controlled language community. This paper considers existing legislative drafting guidelines from the perspective of controlled language. It presents the results of a qualitative comparison of the rule sets of four German-language legislative drafting guidelines from Austria, Germany and Switzerland with a representative collection of controlled language rules published by the German Professional Association for Technical Communication. The analysis determines the extent to which the respective rule sets control the same or similar aspects of language use and identifies the main differences between legislative drafting guidelines and controlled language rules for technical writing.

Nonuniform language in technical writing: Detection and correction

“…Controlled language is another related topic worth mentioning here. Controlled languages have been described as restricted versions of natural languages; they constrain the words, phrases, or syntactic constructions that may be used in the composition of a text (Höfler 2012). Controlled languages are mainly used to achieve three goals: (1) to make it easier for humans to read and interpret a text, (2) to facilitate translation into other languages, and (3) to allow for a direct mapping onto some formal semantic representation accessible to automated reasoning.…”

Deutschschweizerische Gesetzessprache – die kantonalen Richtlinien im Vergleich

“…Zwar wurden gesetzestechnische Richtlinien schon vergleichend untersucht, so etwa bei Müller (1976) und Kindermann (1979) zessprache. Höfler (2012) geht zwar auf die Gesetzessprache ein, beschränkt sich aber auf die Richtlinien der Kantone Bern und Zürich. Die vorliegende Arbeit schliesst diese Lücke, indem sie spezifisch auf die Richtlinien der deutschsprachigen Kantone und auf die darin enthaltenen Empfehlungen zur Gesetzessprache fokussiert.…”