What is a controlled language?

"Natural" = language we use in everyday human to human interaction; for a discussion of the human/computer interface click here.

"Sublanguage" = restricted to a particular domain, such as truck maintenance or weather reports.

"Disambiguated" = ambiguous terminology has been removed and the syntax (sentence structure) has been simplified.

In other words, a "controlled language" is one that has been put in a corset, by pre-editing of the texts to be translated. It should be noted that the extra pre-editing effort diminishes any monetary gain that can subsequently be garnered by machine translation or translation memory assisted human translation.