This paper is concerned with resources for controlled languages for alert messages and protocols in the European perspective. These resources have been produced as the outcome of a project (Alert Messages and Protocols: MESSAGE) which has been funded with the support of the European Commission - Directorate-General Justice, Freedom and Security, and with the specific objective of 'promoting and supporting the development of security standards, and an exchange of know-how and experience on protection of people'. The MESSAGE project involved the development and transfer of a methodology for writing safe and safely translatable alert messages and protocols created by Centre Tesnière in collaboration with the aircraft industry, the health profession, and emergency services by means of a consortium of four partners to their four European member states in their languages (ES, FR (Coordinator), GB, PL). The paper describes alert messages and protocols, controlled languages for safety and security, the target groups involved, controlled language evaluation, dissemination, the resources that are available, both “Freely available” and “From Owner”, together with illustrations of the resources, and the potential transferability to other sectors and users.

Because of its clarity and its simplified way of writing, controlled language (CL) is being paid increasing attention by NLP (natural language processing) researchers, such as in machine translation. The users of controlled languages are of two types, firstly the authors of documents written in the controlled language and secondly the end-user readers of the documents. As a subset of natural language, controlled language restricts vocabulary, grammar, and style for the purpose of reducing or eliminating both ambiguity and complexity. The use of controlled language can help decrease the complexity of natural language to a certain degree and thus improve the translation quality, especially for the partial or total automatic translation of non-general purpose texts, such as technical documents, manuals, instructions and medical reports. Our focus is on the machine translation of medical protocols applied in the field of zoonosis. In this article we will briefly introduce why controlled language is preferred in our research work, what kind of benefits it will bring to our work and how we could make use of this existing technique to facilitate our translation tool.