On developing tools for supporting scientific writing

In the paper a strong need for effective computer support in professional writing is put into focus. Barriers to human understanding (readability) and translation of scientific texts are discussed. Special attention is paid to the suitability of a scientific text for machine translation (translatability), which is now widely used not withstanding its imperfect quality. A computer-based authoring methodology to attend these issues is described. Authoring is viewed as an interactive procedure that makes professionals aware of the typical areas of concern and controls the linguistic parameters of a document thus raising its readability and translatability. The methodology is implemented into a computer tool for research papers on engineering for the Russian-English language pair. The approach described can be applied to other languages and domains.