This paper illustrates the state of the art of an ongoing pilot project for the review of subject fields in the current Issue 8 of the ASD-STE100 Specification. The idea for the project was driven by two key factors: to ensure compliance of the Specification with Terminology Standards and to meet the increasing needs of its intended users (technical authors, translators, and end-users of the technical documentation). We will discuss the history of the legacy terminology which has been used to define subject fields and domains in STE since 1986, the challenges of harmonizing such terminology with current methods and official standards, and the reason for selecting the FAIR methodology and available tools for the related teamwork.
Section 3 will show if and how the categories of STE technical names can be renamed or tagged with Lenoch classification codes.
Section 4 will illustrate the creation of some terminological records using the FAIR methodology. The records will refer to terms selected from the STE dictionary (both approved and not approved words) and to some examples taken from technical name categories.
The ASD-STE100 dictionary has a very simple structure. It is divided into four columns. The first column contains the word, in bold text, followed by the part of speech in parentheses. The text is in uppercase for approved words and in lowercase for unapproved words.
The second column gives the approved meaning or possible alternatives (if the word is not approved). The third column shows an approved example sentence in STE (the uppercase is for ease of reference) and the fourth column shows an example sentence that is not approved (the lowercase is for ease of reference and comparison). Each approved word in STE is only permitted as a specific part of speech. For example, the word ‘test’ is only approved as a noun (‘the test’) but not as a verb (‘to test’). There are rare exceptions to the “One word, one part of speech, one meaning” principle.
In addition to the general vocabulary that is listed in the dictionary, it is necessary to use technical names and technical verbs to write technical texts. Nouns, noun clusters, scientific terms, or verbs such as ‘grease’, ‘discoloration’, ‘propeller’, ‘aural warning system’, ‘overhead panel’, ‘momentum, ‘specific gravity’, ‘to ream’, and ‘to drill’ are not listed in the dictionary, but they qualify as approved terms according to writing rule 1.5 on technical names and writing rule 1.12 on technical verbs, if they can be allocated in the relevant category with the correct meaning. In current Issue 8 there are 20 categories of technical names and 5 categories of technical verbs.
The study described in this paper focuses on the challenges faced when reviewing some of the legacy terminology used within the Specification.
It is first and foremost necessary to preserve the spirit that led to the creation of the Specification to and its maintenance and development in the last forty years. It is therefore essential to keep the instructions in the Specification itself as simple and as clear as possible for authors and users. The Specification must refrain from excessive academic references or complex and obscure concepts. On the other hand, our project wishes to propose a series of changes. These suggestions shall not and must not disrupt or contradict the previous work of the pioneers and longstanding contributors of this CNL. They are merely intended to propose a method to harmonize and adjust some of its key vocabulary elements with international standards.
We therefore decided that an interesting starting point for the pilot project would involve the complex term technical name. Ongoing work of the project and future work focuses on testing a hierarchal structure for the examples in each technical name category. 2.1.
For a non-expert STE user, there may be a possible source of confusion with the prominent position and frequency of the word ‘name’. Originally, this came from the name of items in spare parts catalogs, technical drawings, etc. But, as the categories of technical names evolved from common nouns used in specified contexts, proper nouns for places, persons, or things, particular industry, company or domainspecific noun clusters to also include abstract concepts such as numbers and symbols, adjectives for colors, is the word ‘name’ in technical name really the most accurate choice, or should it be better replaced by ‘(technical) term’?
Taking a step back in time, in the pre-release Issue 0 of AECMA Simplified English (1985) [
However, this was subsequently changed to technical name in Issue 1 (1986) [
In-depth research in the working papers and in the AECMA Simplified English meeting minutes did not show any report on the reasons for replacing technical term (used in pre-release issue 0) with technical name (used from Issue 1 onward).
Because “a technical term is considered to be “the name” of a concept while a definition is the
extended comprehensive interpretation of this name” (Superanskaya 2003) [
ISO 1087-1:2000 defined a term as a Verbal designation of a general concept in a specific subject
field [
Therefore, if we simply focus on classical and standardized meta-terminology nomenclature, and in
accordance with tekom Europe’s approach in [
Change proposals for the ASD-STE100 specification undergo a strict procedure. A proposal must be submitted to the Simplified Technical English Maintenance Group (STEMG) using a Change Form. All Change Forms are analyzed and discussed during the STEMG meetings. If a proposal for change is accepted, it is incorporated in the next issue of the Specification.
When this pilot project is completed, a number of Change Forms shall be submitted to the STEMG for analysis and approval. The first Change Form will be considered as a proposal for a major revision because it suggests replacing technical name with technical term.
Because our project is still ongoing, within this paper we shall continue to refer to the official STE designation technical name. 2.2.
There are 20 technical name categories in current issue 8 of the ASD-STE100 specification. This number has remained unchanged, with few exceptions, since Issue 1 was released in 1986. Over the years, some of these categories merged and made room for new ones, because technological evolution led to the need for more categories and new examples. Furthermore, in each new Issue some of the original or previous examples have been removed, deprecated, or replaced when obsolete. As the Specification broadened its scope outside the aerospace and defense industry, so were some of the names of the categories adjusted. For the same reason, a large part of the example sentences in the general dictionary itself were modified and updated to better represent more industries and different types of technical publications.
The STE dictionary only includes general words (classified in eight parts of speech). Therefore, it is
not a technical or terminological dictionary as originally defined in [
We cannot consider the contents of the technical name categories or the entire list of categories as a
terminological dictionary. Additionally, even the examples for technical names lack the full details of
a dictionary entry and the structure of even the simplest of terminology data records.
We can, however, easily confirm that the use of the designation “category” for technical names and
technical verbs is compliant and consistent with ISO 5127:2017 Category: A broad facet, primary
division of a special classification system or of a main class of a general one [
Thus, the next step of the pilot project was to tag the technical name categories with a publicly
available subject field classification system [
The EuroVoc [
Similarly to EuroVoc, one of the distinctive features of STE is its limitation of polyhierarchy.
We chose to proceed with the Lenoch [
However, it was also immediately evident that not all the titles of the technical name categories
could be tagged with subject field codes using the Lenoch system. Indeed, this would defeat the purpose
of leaving the tasks of final analysis, classification, and validation of a new technical name to
responsibility of the author or of the company linguistic department [
Nevertheless, the broadness of the category titles (as renamed in subsequent editions, revisions and issues of the Specification, from 1986 onwards) confirms the applicability of STE to many more industries and types of documentation than those envisaged when it was first developed.
For the purpose of conciseness, although our ongoing project intends to verify the feasibility of renaming and classifying the subject fields for all categories of technical names and of classifying every listed example, in this paper we summarize the pilot project classification for four categories according to the Lenoch system (Categories 4, 7, 12, and 14). Then, we use the contents of those same categories (examples of technical names) to create term records according to the FAIR terminology principles.
According to the results of the pilot project analysis, the title of category 4 (Names of materials, consumables, and unwanted material) is too broad to fit into a single subject field. It would require too many subject-field tags. The large amount of further classification codes would therefore be confusing and make the coded information useless.
The title of Category 7 (Mathematical, scientific, engineering terms, and formulas) can easily be tagged with multiple codes (MA Mathematics, PH Physics, CH Chemistry) but again, “engineering terms” is too broad.
The pilot project suggests splitting Category 7 into multiple separate categories. However, this
suggestion is not feasible according to the guiding principles of STE, nor with Note 1 in 3.14 in ISO
1087:2019(E) [
Therefore, to ensure consistency with [
These subject field labels or tags can then also be used to generate a unique identifier in a TBX
header as described in 4.2 ISO/TS 24634:2021 [
The final phase of the project used the STE dictionary and the examples of technical name and
technical verb categories to generate a set of terminological data records that complies with the FAIR
Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) [
The FAIRterm Web Application [
For the pilot project and for this paper, we populated a number of terminological records created with the FAIR methodology and the FAIRterm web app. These records, tagged with Lenoch codes, are for words selected from the STE dictionary (approved and not approved words) and for examples taken from categories 4, 7, 12 and 14 of technical names. The selection includes (but is not limited to) the following words and technical names: • • • • • • • abnormality (n) obstruction (n) BLOCKAGE (n) Category 4: aluminum alloy Category 7: defect Category 12: skin
Category 14: irritation, skin irritation.
The early stages of the study confirmed that it is possible to harmonize part of the legacy
terminology used in the ASD-STE100 specification with current standards [
Once this stage is completed, it will also be possible to submit the Change Forms to the STEMG, to propose technical term instead of technical name and to propose re-designing categories with the addition hierarchical sub-domains. The release for Issue 9 is scheduled for April 2024. Upon positive feedback from the STEMG, the final stage will be to deploy a FAIR data resource with all the term records.