Category: SIG

Monthly Watercooler Chat is May 14

(The SIG holds informal phone chats almost every month. By popular demand at the STC Summit 2013, we will now publicise them here on the blog and not just on our internal discussion list.)

Don’t forget our monthly SIG chat is tomorrow, May 14th, at 17:00-18:00 CET (GMT +0100) / 11.00am-12.00pm EST.

For most of us, our work involves communicating with text. Yet there’s a growing demand from users for information using images or sound. This month’s chat is on how we are dealing with such a demand, particularly if we’re working for a global market that requires multiple languages.

This is a joint chat with the International SIG members. We can share our ideas and knowledge.

The topic for this month’s discussion is:

Textless Communication: Graphics, Video, Audio

Some questions to perhaps consider in our discussion: What type of textless communication are we doing and for what type of products? What are users asking for? What are the challenges we face to produce graphics, video and audio content (eg, skills, tools, time, budgets,…)? What are the cost issues? What challenges do we face when localising graphics, video and audio content? How are you dealing with the localisation issues?

If you have any examples of work you’ve done in this area that you would like to discuss, send an example to me to display online during our chat.

A few links on the topic worth looking at are:

Our Watercooler Chat is informal. No speaker, no PowerPoints, no audio recording. It’s moderated. No prior registration is required. It’s free. Bring your experience, ideas and questions to share and discuss with fellow communicators located around the world.

The call-in details are the same for every Watercooler Chat and are sent out in a separate email to discussion list members. Telephone numbers for around the world are provided as well as a webinar link for VoIP.

An STC Europe Summit wrap-up

Whew! The 2013 Summit is over, and many will require long naps to catch up on their sleep!

News about the Summit

Speaking of catching up, go to the Summit site on Lanyrd where all the sessions are listed. Each session is updated, or being updated, with slides and related blog posts.

Two people were very diligent at blogging at the Summit. Sarah Maddox probably wins the prize for live blogging. Sarah’s last post from the Summit collects all her Summit posts in one list. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy a good read. While you are in reading mode, continue over to Kai Weber’s Summit posts for more great blog posts about the Summit.

Searching for sessions that interest you is easiest on Lanyrd, but you can also go straight to SlideShare and search for “stc13″. All presenters were encouraged to post their slides there with the tag stc13.

Eventifier has a collection of photos, tweets, and more from the Summit.

Summit@aClick

If Lanyrd and Slideshare made you long to revisit some sessions, don’t worry. You can! All attendees will receive access to Summit@aClick in 6-8 weeks. If you didn’t attendee, you can already preorder Summit@aClick, which is all the recorded sessions in one package.

Handouts

We had some English-language copies of “How to Write Clearly” on our table at the Summit’s Communities Reception. You can download a free copy of “How to Write Clearly” in the EU bookstore in 23 languages!

You can download the SIG’s brochure (910 KB) for 2013 as a PDF. We had this as a handout at the Summit, too.

And the winner is…

We gave away two subscriptions to the digital Multilingual Magazine during the conference. The winners were Helen O’Shea and Britta Voigt. They have been notified separately.

The magazine is a great resource if you work with internationalisation, localisation, or globalisation issues. Visit their magazine website where you will also find a blog, a free newsletter, the latest news from the industry, and much more. You can also follow them on Twitter at @multilingualmag.

Let’s chat about terminology and best practices

Our latest monthly chat was on a topic at the core of technical communication: terminology. Fourteen of us working in technical communication and translation got together by phone/web chat to share our thoughts and experiences on this topic and hear how we were all managing our terminology.

Terminology isn’t just for localisation

Unfortunately when some companies hear the word “terminology”, they simply think “localisation” – terminology management is a part of the translation process. But it actually kicks in right at the beginning of product development. If you don’t watch your source language terms (for most of us that’s English), then you risk messing up your translated terms too, impacting quality, cost, and time to market of your products across all languages.

Most of us in the chat had between 500 and 5000 English terms documented, usually kept in Microsoft Excel. Some used a permission-based wiki to manage their company’s source language terminology as it is ideal for sharing and collecting information in a central repository. A participant remarked that terminology management systems (TMS), which are used to store and retrieve terminology information, can be difficult to implement.

Yet many of us have problems keeping terminology consistent and correct across all our required languages. And a frequent reason was multiple groups across a company creating their own terms, such as software developers.

Best practice: Collect and control terminology early in a product development cycle.

Who “owns” the terminology?

We agreed that the terminology management process and reaching consensus were more important for ensuring consistent and correct terminology than which tool is used to manage the terms.

Practically none of us had access to a terminologist. The terminology work usually falls upon the technical writers and translators. Yet a common problem faced by several in the group was not being included in the team designing the user interface and advising on the terms to be used. One translator in the call has been asked by a client to propose English terms for them to use in their software.

A couple of us were in the fortunate, and enviable, position where the Technical Publications department is responsible for their all company’s English terminology. In one company the developers can’t use a term in the user interface unless it has been approved by Technical Publications. Sadly this is not usual in most companies.

Best practice: Have a terminology team that selects, defines, and approves the terms.

Controlling the English

Unfortunately for many of us dealing with inconsistent or poorly defined terminology is a regular problem.

One solution proposed in the chat is to use simplified English. One participant uses an open-source (and free) term checker for ASD Simplified Technical English, which is fully customisable. Go to simplified-english.co.uk for more information on this tool.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) had a mixed impact on terminology. Sometimes companies let acquired/merged groups keep their different terminologies as often their products stay separate. However, when products are integrated following an M&A, reaching consensus on terminology can often become political. Managing terms then becomes particularly complicated.

Best practice: Use consistent and correct terminology that has been approved by the company.

Importance of structuring terminology

The translators in the group regularly have to work with terms that are poorly defined so it’s often difficult for them to know the context and figure out how to translate the terms.

We need to provide more information about a term than simply its definition. If you only provide a list of English terms and their translations without definitions or context, then over time the quality of the software and documentation translations will decrease. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to discuss how we collect our terms.

Every term should at least have a definition, subject field, context, part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, or adverb), and abbreviation/acronym (if relevant). Depending on how many products and channels there are, you could also classify the terms by product/channel group. It’s also worth thinking about including the associated deprecated terms so that everyone knows not to use them.

Best practice: Document each term with appropriate metadata.

Find out more on managing terminology

An excellent document how to manage terminology is: Terminology for Large Organizations (link opens PDF).

Results of a survey done in 2010 on terminology practices in the localisation & translation industry: TTC Survey 2010 (link opens PDF).

Let’s chat about reviews

The STC Europe SIG holds monthly chats on a variety of technical communication topics with a focus on international and European issues. People phone in (for the cost of a local call or using VoIP) from the US and Europe to share their experience and knowledge.

This month we had a joint chat with TCeurope (a European umbrella organisation of many national organisations for technical communication). We discussed a topic close to all our hearts: Reviews. How do we get our work reviewed and what issues do we face?

Getting reviews from SMEs – A persistent headache

It won’t come as a surprise to learn that many of us had problems getting punctual reviews back from SMEs, indeed sometimes getting any reviews back from them. The problem was often complicated by the SMEs being located in other countries. Frozen travel budgets mean that face-to-face meetings may never happen, making it harder for us to develop a relationship with our distant colleagues.

The poor quality of work by technical writers was an issue for some of us at some stage in our careers, yet surprisingly companies often wouldn’t deal with the problem. As a result SMEs didn’t respect the documentation group and wouldn’t bother reviewing the documentation. And some SMEs don’t consider documentation their problem.

The disappearing editor

Few of us in the chat had the services of an editor yet getting a review by an editor helps to ensure that documentation standards are applied. One way to get around this problem is to do peer reviews. However, not all of us worked with other writers and such reviews weren’t always successful.

Style guides sometimes caused problems such as:

  • Inheriting a style guide from other groups but there was never time to customise it to our own needs.
  • Writers not using the style guide. One person’s company has such a large style guide that none of the technical writers read it. On the flip side, another chat participant had an editor who almost exclusively worked maintaining their style guide and Acrolinx tool so that the writers found it easy to correctly apply documentation standards.

The maturity of a company clearly plays an important role in a company’s approach to documentation quality. Startups tend to focus on improving product quality. More established companies usually have had the time and resources to establish best practices to better ensure documentation quality.

One interesting comment was on the future of content ownership. If documentation continued to have quality problems, perhaps customer-focussed groups such as Marketing, Pre Sales, or Product Management may push to take ownership of it. We should be developing closer working relationships with these groups.

Shared advice

Although there is no one simple solution to solve all our problems with reviews, we shared our knowledge and experience on what can help improve review-related issues:

Build a relationship with your reviewers

Building a relationship with colleagues is crucial for success. If you can’t meet them in person, then do so virtually. Phone them. Use tools such as Webex, Skype, and instant messaging to “meet” them.

Make it easy to review

Avoid sending out a large document for review. Do it in chunks. Send emails with specific questions, and give your emails attention grabbing titles such as “Is this correct?” Highlight the changes in the content that needs to be reviewed. Use a wiki, for example, to encourage people to add their comments.

Make a business case on the cost of poor reviews to the company

Poor reviews impact documentation quality, so Support gets more calls from customers for help, and this costs the company. Sales can also be impacted. Don’t continue to passively accept poor reviews by SMEs. Get to know someone in Finance or Product Management to provide you with data on how much poor documentation could be costing the company. Show the information to those in your company who care about cost, such as the CEO.

I’d like to also thank TCeurope for joining us in this lively discussion. It was great to meet your members and I hope we can do more joint events together.

Update: Comments are closed due to the title attracting lots of spammers.

What’s your name?

by Jen O Neill

I watched many TV hours of the recent Olympics in London. I hadn’t expected to get so involved with it but it was fantastic. The British put on a wonderful games. Listening to the BBC sports presenters discussing the various events, I noticed that the names of many athletes also caused discussion. It wasn’t always obvious to TV presenters how to spontaneously pronounce some names. Husain Bolt runs off the tongue but Gulden Kayalar Kuzubasioglu may need some prior thought. Several presenters admitted to practising names beforehand. I’ve no idea if they were correctly pronounced.

The BBC journalists at this year’s Olympics haven’t been the only ones to have had problems figuring out how to pronounce the names of athletes. When personal names move outside of their usual cultural environment, you might need some help when faced with an unknown personal name. This site is worth visiting to hear names pronounced correctly.

But my name is….

First impressions (from an Anglo-Saxon perspective) suggest that my name, Jennifer O Neill, is straightforward to write and pronounce. However, one consequence of moving around between different countries and languages is that your name can take on unforeseen new meanings. To date I’ve lived in five countries and two languages and my apparently simple name has had some unexpected surprises.

My surname is one of the most common Irish surnames so it’s easy to assume that everyone everywhere is familiar with it, particularly as Irish pubs are found all over the world and they tend to be called after Irish names. Bad assumption.

There’s no apostrophe in my surname but there is a space as my surname is two words. This “hole” in the name can occasionally cause confusion. Many people don’t expect a word in a name to have only one letter. Sometimes when I enter my name in an online form, the form automatically assumes the “O” is the initial of my middle name and that my family name is “Neill”. Americans often write their names with a middle initial so I’m possibly falling foul of a form design planned for this habit. The W3C has a useful site on the cultural aspects of personal names when designing online forms.

You mean it’s a real name?

As a kid in Montréal, I went to the local French-speaking school and I was called Geneviève, the French for Jennifer. So years later when I moved to Paris, I wondered whether I’d again be called Geneviève.

The French have no issues with “Jennifer” (even though “Geneviève” is one of the patron saints of Paris). It was always pronounced and spelt correctly. However, when pronouncing my surname I had to learn to listen out for “Jennifer Onaay”. C’est moi! The spelling problems always involved the double “L”. I always just received one.

Moved on to Brussels and another unexpected identity change. No francophone pronunciation this time, however. It was when out shopping and paying by plastic that my new identity appeared. Several shop assistants were surprised by my surname on my payment card. “You mean it’s a real name?” For them “O’Neill” is a mark of sportswear (they never notice the lack of apostrophe). They continue to find it extraordinary that I’ve been named after a brand of wetsuits. I may as well be called “Jennifer Adidas” or “Jennifer Nike”.

So does that mean that for many people around the world anyone called “MacDonald” is named after a …?

And another identity pops up….

We should have expected that that hole in our surname might cause problems. A Chinese client of my brother in Canada would always phone the company’s reception and ask to speak with “Mister Shanee One Ill”. We had previously never thought about moving the hole. But if “o neill” makes no sense to you, “one ill” at least is two recognisable English words. Indeed keeping up with how one’s name is pronounced and possibly battered around the world could sometimes require an aspirin.

Has your name changed identity?

Has your name changed in meaning or pronunciation when used outside of its usual cultural circle? What stories do you have of your perhaps unexpected new identities in an increasingly global world?

Untangling Chinglish

by Jen O Neill

The development and manufacturing of many of the hardware products I document have been outsourced to Chinese companies. They work closely with our in-house engineers and product managers to develop customised products for our global customers. We release dozens of such products a year. The technology of these products is changing so quickly that it would be difficult for us to develop so many products in-house ourselves. Competitors also outsource their development and manufacturing for these products. See our earlier blog post “Working with OEMs”.

The Chinese engineers write generic manuals, which they then send to us to customise for our versions of the products. Their manuals are written in Chinglish. English strongly influenced by Chinese. They can have strange terms, long-winded sentences, missing grammar, simplistic mixed up verb formats, curious word order.

I’m working with an English that’s been contaminated by a language I don’t know: Chinese.

The infamous web photos of China’s Chinglish signage are amusing to read. A 70-page manual of it can be challenging. And fascinating.

So I’ve been reading up on how Chinese is written. Knowing some basic Chinese grammar helps to untangle the Chinglish and makes it easier to rewrite it into English. I’ve become curious about Chinese.

General information about Chinese

Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet. Instead it uses characters, called hanzi. There are around 40,000 characters in the language and as a beginner you need to learn around 2,000 to 3,000 just to be able to read a newspaper, for example.

No articles or prepositions. No plural or singular either

Chinese nouns don’t have articles such as “the” or “a” so they can be often missing in Chinglish. Nor does Chinese have a plural form. It’s implied in the context. As a result there are often mistakes in number in the Chinglish:

Chinglish: Can’t Add More User!
English: You can’t add any more users.

What’s with all the commas?

When you look at a text written in Chinese you’ll notice that there are a lot of commas as shown in this image.

Unlike English, the comma splice is frequently used in Chinese. Clauses are linked by commas where in English we’d use separate sentences. This means that when Chinese is poorly translated, we can often have a long paragraph of just a single sentence. Chinglish can be full of commas:

Chinglish: The enable status of camera already changed, device will reboot automatically, please enter the remote configuration after reboot is complete.
English: The camera reboots automatically when its parameters are modified. When rebooting is complete, configure the remote parameters.

(You’ll also notice that there are no breaks between words in Chinese.)

Another example of Chinglish written as a single sentence:

Chinglish: The whole screen is divided into 22*18 panes, you can use “ ↑ “ “ ↓ “ “ → “ “ ← “ keys to move the yellow pane to your hope position and press “ EDIT “ key, the yellow pane will be turned into red, then you can use “ ↑ “ “ ↓ “ “ → “ “ ← “ keys to extend the red pane.

Often the first thing I’ll do when I receive a text from the engineers is to quickly look through it to see if there are a lot of commas. This gives me a rough idea of the state of the “English” and how much rework may be required.

Past, present or future? It depends on the context

Chinese has no verb tenses. The tense depends on its context. To indicate that something has happened in the future or past, for example, time context words such as “yesterday” or “next year” are often added to the sentence. And unlike English, the time words come before the verb in Chinese.

Verb errors are common in Chinglish:

Chinglish: This action trigger local audible on box.
English: This action will trigger the unit’s buzzer.

Chinglish: The log items are more than 200 pieces, please short query range!
English: There are more than 200 log items. Please specify a smaller query range.

Chinglish: ESC button represents “Cancel”.
English: Press ESC to Cancel.

How did “Rule” become “Handle”?

The Wikipedia web page on Chinglish cites several possible causes for texts being written in Chinglish such as errors in Chinese dictionaries, no native English speakers checking the text, and the use of translation software.

None of our Chinese engineers are fluent in English. Their English is often a literal translation of the Chinese. They’re clearly thinking in Chinese when writing English, which produces Chinglish. Although I’ve never asked, I assume that they use translation software when writing their text as they often use the wrong synonym of a term or simply use a term that apparently has no logic for the context.

Chinglish: Modem drop off.
English: The modem is disconnected.

Chinglish: The image sticks.
English: The image freezes.

Each Chinese character represents a word or concept and often serves multiple purposes. Their meaning depends on context. So translating each character individually can easily produce an inaccurate or confusing result in English.

This excellent article by Mark Liberman discusses literal translation and explains the process of how “Disposable coffee cup” on a sign became translated as “A time sex thing” using translation software.

The biggest problem I have understanding Chinglish is with such mistranslated terms. One example is “handle” being used instead of “rule” in the manuals (such as when you configure the rules for how a system should respond to an alarm situation). One example:

Chinglish: View Tampering Handle.
English: View tampering rules.

I couldn’t see the link between “rule” and “handle” until I read Mark’s article. I entered the Chinese term for “rule” (taken from a software string) into Google Translate and it proposed the English term, “Deal with”, and several synonyms (processing, handling, handle, process). No “Rule” but a probable explanation as to why “Handle” appears in the manuals.

So I’m now wondering if the Chinese translation software tool used by the engineers lists “Handle” at or near the top of the English term options provided, making it an easy selection. If you don’t really know the target language well, you tend to select the first word the translation tool proposes.

I’ve tried this test with other peculiar English terms in the manuals when I have the corresponding Chinese term. I now have a better understanding of why some strange English terms have probably been used. Google Translate and the other translation software tools available on the web are useful tools and are continually improving. But they aren’t infallible.

In the meantime, my interest in Chinese grows.

For more information on Chinese grammar, see Wikipedia’s entry on Chinese grammar, grammar information from chinesenotes.com and a learner FAQ from the Chinese Grammar Wiki.

And what’s my elevator speech?

I enable English, natively.

Challenges facing global documentation standards

Every month the Europe SIG holds a web chat for members and this month we discussed the issues involved in implementing global documentation standards. We had no shortage of issues to discuss!

We all agreed that having shared and consistent documentation standards and procedures for all writers in a company are necessary goals but trying to achieve and maintain such a harmonised state was often an uphill and ever changing struggle. The ground often keeps moving.

Earthquakes that fracture global documentation standards

When reading the numerous articles and blogs about the tools available to facilitate standardising documentation content and processes – and the cost of some recommendations can run into many thousands of dollars/euros long term – I often find myself wondering, “What a stable environment these guys must work in. They apparently don’t get hit by earthquakes.”

The earthquake in question is mergers and acquisitions (M&As). All of us taking part in the discussion had experience the impact of M&As, sometimes several times, and the detrimental effect they can have on us developing and maintaining effective documentation standards across the company.

The impact often creates virtual writing teams dispersed over a wide geographic area, even several countries, and who’ve probably never worked together before. Unfortunately companies often make little effort to merge the cultures of the different virtual teams. With many travel budgets frozen these days, the virtual team members may never get to meet face to face so it can be difficult to forge strong relationships. Trust and mutual understanding can take a hit.

In the worst case, the technical publications department may even disappear following an M&A with writers now reporting locally to, say, different Engineering groups. Have upper management considered the impact on documentation standards and cost in such situations?

Outsourcing writing and R&D can also complicate the goal of achieving harmonised standards across a company.

As the STC annual conference approaches, I can’t help but notice that the impact of M&As on our work is rarely discussed even though many of us have probably been impacted by such earthquakes.
Strange omission.

Controlling the standards

One M&A issue we discussed was how the role of the editor can change as teams become more virtual and culturally dissimilar. Even if all the writers in a global company supposedly use the same style guide, templates and processes, there’s no guarantee that everyone will correctly use them. It’s too easy to ignore style guides. Scattered teams mean that it’s harder to enforce standards. It becomes easier to ignore the editor’s recommendations, particularly if there’s no feeling of being part of the same team. The editors can find themselves swamped with work, which then delays the release of the documentation. Management in an attempt to remove the process bottleneck or to reduce costs may simply cut the editorial stage. Editors are an increasingly rare bird these days.

The politics of change

The restructuring and musical chairs that often follows an M&A can mean that the person put in charge of the newly created or restructured documentation department may not be the person with the most experience in technical communications or in working in a global business environment encompassing many countries and languages. The choice of a leader can be “political”, which could impede the success of implementing global standards. The style guide itself can also pose “political” issues that may determine whether or not the different virtual teams use it correctly.

Need to develop business awareness

Those tools that could help us do our work more efficiently need budgets. The impact of M&As on documentation forces us to become better at understanding the business decisions made by upper management. Our discussion brought up the issue that there’s often a lack of understanding by documentation managers on how global business operates and how cultural differences impact our work. Not all regional markets within a company may do business the same way, for example, so the documentation needs can vary around the world.

Shared stories

Our one hour discussion didn’t solve the problem on how to make it easier to harmonise documentation written globally. But we got to share our stories and compare notes and to realise that we’re not alone in our harmonisation problems.

How have M&As impacted your implementation of global documentation standards?

Results of our recent Watercooler Webinar survey

At the end of last year we surveyed our members about our regular Watercooler Webinar chats and what topics you’d like to discuss in 2012. We had 18 respondents.

Most people replied that they would prefer to discuss internationalisation and global work issues (82%) covering producing documentation for international audiences and working with teams/companies located globally. Fewer (18%) were interested in discussing localisation and translation issues covering adapting documentation to regional needs and translation project issues.

Top internationalisation & global work topics to discuss

The survey gave a list of five proposed topics for discussion and here are the results in order of preference:

  1. Global harmonisation of documentation standards across different writing groups in a company
  2. Getting started in terminology management
  3. Collecting metrics about our documents
  4. Impact of mergers and acquisitions on documentation and writing teams, particularly if the teams are located across different countries
  5. Making a business case to get a new tool for doing documentation

Internationalisation & global work topics proposed by respondents are

  • Embedded information in globalised software
  • Content structure differences across languages and locales
  • Why tech pubs is the logical department to lead these tasks

Top localisation and translation issues topics to discuss

The survey gave a list of four proposed topics for discussion and here are the results in order of preference:

  1. Doing more with less when translating manuals – let’s talk money.
  2. European Union directives and their impact on documentation.
  3. Absent best practices – Most localisation problems start with the English source documentation.
  4. The impact can poor content and layout on localization.
  5. Stepping into the House of Babel. What to consider when starting to get our documentation translated.

When to hold the chats

We also asked about when you’d like to hold the chats. Most of you (44%) preferred the second week of the month to hold the chat. Wednesday was the most popular day (50%) but Tuesday and Thursday scored well too (39% each).

Two times were favoured for the chats: 16:00 CET (10:00 am EST) and 17:00 CET (11:00 am EST). Both scored 56%. Third most popular time was 18:00 CET (12:00 EST) scoring 50%.

Our next chat

So for 2012, we’ll be holding our Watercooler Webinar chats on Wednesdays, the second week of the month. Later in the afternoon seems the best time, either 16:00 or 17:00 CET. Over the next couple of months we’ll discuss the two top topics selected, Global harmonisation and Getting started in terminology. These results also give us good ideas for webinar presentations by invited speakers.

Our next Watercooler Webinar chat will be on Wednesday, 8 February. Details will be sent out to members shortly.

And don’t forget Alice Jane Emanuel’s webinar on Thursday, 31 January, on documentation and typography! It should be excellent.

Watercooler Webinar: Collecting user feedback

by Jen O Neill

In this month’s Watercooler Webinar held by the Europe SIG, we discussed the various ways we can collect feedback from the global users of the products we document. Many of us write for audiences located across countries and languages. How do we find out if our documentation meets their needs when due to geography, language or cost factors, it often isn’t practical for us to meet them directly?

In our chat, we discussed the different ways to collect information from users. It was interesting to hear real examples of how people have done it.

Contacting technical support

An obvious source of customer information is speaking with technical support and product management. They can be a mine of information about customers and the problems they’re reporting. Some companies, such as HP, keep knowledge databases of calls received by technical support and the solutions provided. Such databases can then be searched for problems encountered by users. Even smaller companies will have a log of issues brought up by customers.

One tool that we all seemed to have used at one stage in our quest for user feedback was forms. A well designed form is crucial and care is needed to prepare the questions so that you collect useful and correct information. A book recommendation was “Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability” by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney.

Two useful points brought up were that it’s a good idea to offer a prize or small gift to those who take part in surveys as a way of saying thanks. Often this can simply be to send the results of the survey to respondents. Another point was if you are collecting feedback via email, you should use an email alias address instead that of a person.

One source of documentation feedback that writers may not consider is that from translators. We had a translator in the discussion who described that translators often pick up inconsistencies and errors in texts and terminology and will seek to ask writers for clarification.

Interestingly, none of us worked for companies that used social media such as Facebook or Twitter to collect information from customers.

Customer surveys

An example of a customer survey that we discussed was one my company did a few years ago. The European technical writers had to do projects as part of their Six Sigma Green Belt certification to improve documentation quality. We used a multilingual Web survey to collect feedback from customers about our documentation.

We drew up a 10-question online questionnaire covering satisfaction, usefulness of the manuals and problems encountered across three product groups. Questions had five-point scales for answering with one open-ended question. We did the questionnaire in seven languages including English as most of our customers don’t work in English. As we each managed the localisation of our own projects, we knew the technical support people in the sales offices across Europe. They were the in-country reviewers for translations. So we asked them to help us translate the questionnaire and any associated texts.

The seven language versions of the survey were located on the European HQ web site. We got the agreement from the country sales managers in seven countries to have information on their national web sites about the survey that linked to the HQ site with the multilingual questionnaires. Two of the country managers did a mailing to all their customers to encourage them to take part in the survey. The survey ran for a month and we got nearly 200 participants, most from the countries that did the mailings to customers (next time we will push hard to get all country offices to do mailings to customers about the survey). Respondents didn’t receive a prize or gift for taking part nor get a copy of the results. However, the sales offices did get to see the results.

We found that doing a multilingual survey took more effort than if it had just been one language; there were more steps to organise due to the need to get translations of the questionnaire, web page text and answers, as well as seeking the OK from the sales office managers. But we didn’t have any problems getting the support of our colleagues located in the sales offices located around Europe. They were also interested. However, analysing and writing up the data took time as it had to be done on top of the daily workload. We hadn’t allocated enough scheduled time to this task so it took longer than originally planned.

Meeting customers at trade/training meetings

Another participant, Karen Mardahl, described how she collected feedback from customers by attending a global meeting run by her company for their partners and distributors. This was the first time that such a meeting had been held in several years and attendees came from many countries. It was also the first time Karen got to meet readers of the documentation face to face. The company did a questionnaire to collect information from the attendees on many topics, and Karen got them to include one question dealing with documentation.

Based on the information collected during the meeting, the company now does a weekly newsletter to connect with their partners. A single topic is discussed in each newsletter, and feedback and questions on any product and service are very welcome. The newsletter is encouraging them to get in touch with the company with their issues.

The next Watercooler Webinar

It’s always interesting to meet with fellow professionals and compare notes, to catch up with what’s been happening at work and see how it applies to what we’re doing. This month’s Watercooler Webinar let us discuss the practicalities of collecting user feedback. The webinar is free to SIG members and you can phone in from almost anywhere in the world using the list of phone numbers provided. Come and join us in January for our next webinar! Watch our discussion list for details.

Webinar: Measure the Quality of your Documentation, 22 March

The STC Europe SIG and STC France chapter are pleased to present a joint webinar to the technical communication community on 22 March at 19.00 CET.

Quality-assessment expert and STC member, Alice Jane Emanuel, will introduce an easy-to-use, yet comprehensive tool for document quality assessment. Alice Jane will demonstrate how this tool provides granular feedback so that you can improve your documentation, and provide empirical data so that you can track your or your team’s progress towards better quality documentation, improve your documentation department’s quality of output, and create useful documentation metrics.

Our Presenter, Alice Jane Emanuel

Alice Jane Emanuel is a quality-assessment expert with more than 15 years of experience in large-scale regional and international peer review activities. She developed this tool out of a process of research and development that included years of working on peer review assessment tools, working with other peer review professionals, and marketing the business benefits of quality to corporate management in a fast-paced business world.

Registration

Sign up today at http://stcwebinardocquality.eventbrite.com/. All the details about the registration process are there, along with the time of the webinar in your time zone. (If in doubt about the time for you, use the Time and Date converter tool.)

Pricing

  • Free: Members of STC’s Europe SIG and France Chapter
  • 15 Euros: Members of STC, CRT, ISTC, and other Intecom societies
  • 30 Euros: Non-STC members (consider joining STC and the chapter or SIG today to get the reduced rate!)