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.

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.

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!)

Call for Papers: Special Issue

You are invited to consider submitting proposals for researched papers or best practices pieces in a special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization entitled “Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices.” This issue, to be published in fall 2011, will focus on training in global contexts from the perspective of both those who train and those who learn. We seek submissions from a variety of perspectives including business, science, humanitarian practice, health, social advocacy, education, and government.

The Background

Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices
(to be published in September/the Fall of 2011)

The twenty-first century has been characterized by rapid transformation—technological, social, cultural, environmental, economic, and scientific. In this changing milieu, organizations and individuals must continually acquire new knowledge and abilities or be left behind. Influential entities such as the United Nations strongly advocate the pursuit of lifelong learning for individuals, while leading companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations seek to become what scholars such as Peter Senge have called “learning organizations” that can transform themselves through the learning of their members at all levels.

Training, or the structured development of skills, competencies, and up-to-date knowledge, is an increasingly important element in these pursuits. The shape of training may vary—formal or informal, face-to-face or technologically mediated, short-term or long-term—but the end purpose is always the same: to facilitate learning by individuals or groups, usually with the larger purpose of enhancing organizational quality.

Training is vital to the success of globally connected organizations and individuals, but success requires the trainers’ effective bridging of linguistic, cultural, and social distances. Only teams and individuals with facility in navigating diverse languages, cultures, technologies, educational practices, and rhetorical traditions will be able to successfully provide training to global audiences.

Professional communicators, whose discipline claims expertise in several areas relevant to training—including oral, written, and visual rhetoric, usability, information architecture, electronic collaboration, intercultural communication, and collaboration with translators—are well positioned to contribute to global training efforts or take on the role of trainers themselves. Yet, despite these advantages, the pool of research on training in global audiences is limited, especially within the field of professional communication.

The Focus of the Special Issue

This special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization seeks to address this need by providing a space for scholarly research and best practices on the topic of global, organizational training. The issue, entitled Navigating the Global Training Terrain: New Literacies, Competencies, and Practices will focus on training in global contexts from the perspective of both those who train and those who learn, including current research and best practices. The special issue will also cast an eye toward organizational training as it is evolving towards the future.

The editors of the special issue welcome submissions from a variety of perspectives including business, science, humanitarian practice, health, social advocacy, education, and government.

Possible topics pertaining to the theory, teaching, and practice of training in global contexts include the following, among others:

• Intercultural considerations in the design and delivery of training
• Training and the social web
• Cultural intelligence for trainers and training audiences
• Language use and translation in training contexts
• Meta-communication and training
• Communities of practice
• Legal issues in global training
• Economic aspects of global training
• Assessment of global training
• Training from a distance

Submitting Proposals

Proposals (up to 500 words) for research papers, short best practices pieces [*], and tutorials are due by October 10th, 2010. Review criteria can be found on the Journal’s website at www.rpcg.org. Proposals should be sent as an email attachment to one of the guest editors of the special issue:

• Pam Brewer, Appalachian State University: brewerpe @ appstate.edu
• Jim Melton, Central Michigan University: james.melton @ cmich.edu
• Joo-Seng Tan: Nanyang Technological University: ajstan @ ntu.edu.sg

[*] We strongly encourage practitioners to submit best practices pieces on any of the topics identified in this CFP or on related topics. Best practices describe the training strategies, approaches, or methods that work in a particular situation or environment.

• What has worked and why?
• What has not worked so well, and what could work better?

Authors may use the following optional framework for best practices pieces: title, description, methods used, results, technologies used, and lessons learned. While the proposal and review process is the same for research papers, tutorials, and best practices pieces, final manuscripts for best practices should be shorter: approximately 1000 to 3000 words in length.

Production Schedule

The schedule for the special issue is as follows:

• 10 October 2010 — 500-word proposals due
• 15 October 2010 – Guest editors return proposal decisions to submitters
• 10 January 2011 – Draft manuscripts of accepted proposals due
• 1 July 2011 — Final manuscripts due
• September 2011 — Publication date of special issue

About the Journal

The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication and Globalization publishes articles on the theory, practice, and teaching of technical and professional communication in critical global and intercultural contexts such as business, manufacturing, environment, information technology, and others. As a global initiative, the Journal welcomes manuscripts with diverse approaches and contexts of research, but manuscripts are to be submitted in English and grounded in relevant theory and appropriate research methods. The Journal is peer reviewed with an editorial board consisting of experienced researchers and practitioners from over 20 countries.

The Journal is free or “open access,” using PKP open source software and housed at East Carolina University.

The first edition is planned for September 2010, and it will be published thereafter on a quarterly basis. For more information, see www.rpcg.org.

Please feel free to share this CFP with others who may be interested. We hope that this special issue will represent academic and practitioner perspectives as well as multiple disciplines.

One of the biggest problems I have when planning the localisation of the documents that I receive is the issue of embedded text in graphics.

Embedded text is more expensive to deal with than using numbered callouts in a graphic. However, writers aren’t always keen on using numbered callouts with graphics as they feel they can make the graphics harder to read. So there can be a challenge between meeting localisation budget demands and producing documentation with easy to use graphics.

There is probably a cultural element here, too, as European readers may be more used to seeing numbered callouts used in documents than perhaps North American readers due to the number of languages that must be catered for in Europe.

But with careful planning, graphics can still be both cost and visually effective.

The cost implications

Localizing embedded text in graphics is expensive and time-consuming. Let’s say you have a graphic in Adobe Illustrator with some text embedded in it and you need it in 10 languages. Each language will be placed in a separate layer in the graphic file. To do each translated version of the graphic takes around 15 minutes per language. That’s 2.5 hours. For one graphic. The translation agency charges, say, 30 euros an hour for such work (this doesn’t include the actual translation which is a small cost).

This single graphic has cost 75 euros to put into 10 languages. If your document has, say, 10 graphics requiring similar work, you’ve spent 750 euros getting these 10 graphics into the required 10 languages. It’s taken 25 hours to localise the graphics in one document, around three working days.

It would cost much more, and take more time, if the graphics are jpegs with bitmapped text.

Using numbered callouts in the graphic with the associated text included in a legend underneath means that the text can be easily translated using translation memory tools along with the documentation. This improves consistency and reduces cost. And there’s no cost to modify graphics.

If you send dozens of documents a year for translation to an agency, the cost of translating embedded text in graphics quickly accumulates. Management may start asking why it’s spending such sums which could be reduced or avoided. We need to ensure that we’re using our localisation budgets wisely and diligently. The money spent dealing with embedded text could perhaps instead be used, for example, in releasing documentation in further languages for new markets.

Make room for the text

Translated text takes up more space than English, the usual source language. And the impact of text expansion is much more pronounced with short blocks of text, such as text callouts, than with long paragraphs. Leave room in the English document and graphic for the text to expand once translated.

Sometimes when working in Word, a writer may place text boxes on graphics to avoid using numbered callouts. This is not recommended. Translation memory tools can’t access text inside a text box. It must be manually extracted for translation, introducing a risk of error and inconsistency. There is also the risk that when a text box is placed on a graphic, the translated text may then hide much of the graphic due to expansion.

It’s also important to tell the translation agency which terms in a graphic-associated text are not to be translated. Some embedded text such as measurements, product names and text embossed on to the product itself can stay in English and needs no rework.

Screen shots

Ideally translated documents should have their screen shots in the local language. However, it’s expensive and time consuming to get all the screen shoots in the required languages.

Best practices

Try to limit the number of graphics that require localization in order to facilitate the localization process and help control costs. Before sending your documents to a translation agency for a quote, check the graphics for any potential localisation issues and either fix them in the English source file to avoid incurring extra costs or tell the agency what you expect them to do to the graphics and pay.

Use numbered callouts: Use numbered callouts with a legend underneath rather than embed text in your graphics. The text associated with a graphic is then translated as part of the main text of the manual. Numbered callouts are particularly cost effective when you are doing several languages.

Plan for text expansion: Plan for translated text to occupy 100% more space than the English. Leave plenty of white space around text callouts (if not using numbered callouts) and callout lines in the graphics.

Screen shots: Limit their use. If you are not translating the screen shots in a manual, tell the translation agency how to handle the English GUI text that appears in the main body of the manual. It helps users to have the GUI text translated so an effective way to do so in this situation is to include the translated GUI text in parenthesis alongside the English GUI text.

Even if you only produce documentation in a single language and don’t deal with an international audience, using consistent terminology matters.

SDL recently released the results of a terminology survey that they conducted earlier this year. The study is an interesting review on the trends and opinions on the subject of terminology management.

They asked two groups about terminology management: a business audience and translators.

When asked what they considered to be the most important impact of inconsistent terminology, the business audience replied the quality of the content, internal communication and customer satisfaction. Inconsistent terminology also impacts the cost of translation and branding.

Three departments are largely responsible for owning the terminology in a company: Technical Publications, Translation/Localisation, and Marketing. They’re responsible for the management, maintenance and approval of terminology.

The most common internal process they used for managing terminology were style guides and spreadsheets to store terms. Over 35% of the business respondents said that they keep their terminology in a style guide. However, only 50% shared their terminology lists with other departments in the company.

This lack of sharing with other departments obviously increases the risk that departments could be using different terms for the same meaning. And yet, as so many departments in a company use common terminology—not just technical publications and marketing—it’s a lost opportunity not to collaborate in sharing terminology to ensure consistency.

All parties taking part in the survey agreed that the problems related to inconsistent terminology start with the source documentation. Indeed 40% of translators said that they frequently encountered inconsistent terminology.
The translators said that the main impact of inconsistent terminology is on translation quality, style and consistency, client satisfaction and their productivity. These are the parameters often used to measure a translator’s success and performance. We can conclude from this that consistent terminology makes the translator’s work much easier as well as improving quality.

An interesting point shown in the survey is how few companies take responsibility for their terminology in the localization stage. The translators said that only 15% of clients drove terminology management. Terminology management just isn’t part of the localization strategy of many companies (they do have a localisation content strategy, right?). Indeed it’s more likely that the translator takes ownership of terminology than the company that created the source documentation being translated. We put all that effort in creating a document and then practically abandon control over it when it moves to another language.

An example: Same meaning, different terms

Over the years my company has been through various acquisitions and mergers. Being a global company, content is also created across the globe by different groups. The content is often then reused in different documents. All this has provided many opportunities for inconsistency in our terminology. For example, the following six terms have all appeared in our product datasheets.

• Operating temperature
• Temperature range
• Temperature
• Working temperature
• Operating temperature range
• Ambient temperature range

Unfortunately these terms all describe the same feature: the operating temperature of a product.

The datasheets were subsequently translated into multiple languages. The inconsistency in the English source terminology has bred inconsistency across the other languages—a domino effect. We’ve found that, for example, we have four different ways to say “operating temperature” in French and three different ways in Spanish (I gave up counting for the other languages). This inconsistency with just one term illustrates the widespread impact that poor terminology management can have across multiple documents and languages.

SDL’s survey clearly showed that terminology needs to be managed during the whole content life cycle, from the moment we decide a source document is needed through to the localisation of the content.

Gripe no. 1. Where did “Why?” go?

Nothing is more frustrating when reading a manual than when the instructions only seem to focus on “How” to do something without telling me “Why” I need to do it.

Gripe no. 2. Receiving a manual for localisation that has serious usability problems.

It really is a waste of time and money getting such documents translated. Good translators will pick out inconsistencies and ask how to handle them (try answering such a question about a product you didn’t document but need the answer quickly.) There’s the real risk that in-country reviewers will then rewrite the translated manual to try to improve the content with the result the translated manual no longer matches the English source one and you may well incur extra charges from the translation agency as the translator now has to do extra work to update the translation memories. And then the customer probably won’t use the manual and will phone Tech Support instead. I can think of better ways to blow several thousand euros without annoying customers.

Gripe no. 3. Poor public signage.

Street names are like chapter titles for streets. They tell you where you are. Some cities are terrible at placing street names on every street corner and placing them so they can be easily seen by pedestrians and drivers (not two stories up the side of the building or just simply missing, for example.) Of course, once you do find that elusive street, you’re assuming the buildings are then clearly numbered…

Gripe no. 4. Why does it rain once I clean the windows?

I have to have some reason why I don’t clean them.

When selling products in Europe, how do we decide into which languages we should translate our user documentation? This is a potentially expensive, yet important, question.

In an ideal world, we would translate the documentation into the language of every country in which we sell our products. However, not only could this be prohibitively expensive, it might also be a waste of money and time. Not all products or audiences may require a translated user manual. Yet by not providing the documentation in a language of a country, we might be breaking that country’s laws. In this era of tight budgets and deadlines, it’s important to know how to select which languages are required for our markets.

When planning the localisation requirements of our documentation, we should consider the following criteria:

1. Legally required languages
2. Legally recommended languages
3. Commercial decision

Always seek the advice of the company’s legal department to get guidelines specific for your products and markets.

Legally required

What we’re selling will play a deciding role in determining which languages are provided to customers. Medical and life safety products, such as fire alarm systems, have much more demanding legal requirements for translation than products with no such impact. As a life safety product even if we sell only one smoke detector in Iceland, for example, we’d have to translate the user instructions into Icelandic.

And the law doesn’t stay still. Recently, the European Union directive for medical devices was updated, requiring software to be now translated. A useful article for information on the legal aspects of localisation is Who is afraid of clinical data requirements?

Regulatory information often must be translated. For some European Union (EU) directives, the information provided to end users must translated into the official EU languages. Examples of such directives are those for WEEE and battery disposal. So some regulatory information may need to be provided to users in more languages than the user manual itself. For more information on regulatory issues across many sectors in the European Union, go to the European Commission’s industry sectors overview.

Several European countries legally require user documentation for any product to be translated into the local language. If selling products in France or Germany, we must translate the software and instructions for use into the local language. The instructions for use can be in print or digital format (for example, PDF, Web, Help…) Further information on the French law can be found in this article about Toubon Law.

Russian and Ukrainian laws insist that the end user and installation documentation be translated into Russian for products to be legally sold in these countries.

And we also need to be aware if our company has any contractual agreements with customers to provide the product documentation in selected languages.

Legally recommended

Unfortunately, sometimes there can be grey areas surrounding translation requirements for some countries. In such situations, seek the advice from the legal department. Although a country may not legally require the user documentation to be translated, if that country’s market is commercially important to a company, the legal department may decide that user documentation must be translated.

Commercial decision

In this situation, languages are selected for purely for commercial reasons. Product managers select the languages required for software and documentation depending on market demands.

We need to know the impact of legal requirements when planning the localisation of documentation. Work closely with the product managers and legal department when selecting the languages required. And develop written guidelines to help all parties in the company know what legal requirements the software and technical documentation must meet in the international marketplace.

We often hear about the advantages of being fluent in a second language such as when visiting a foreign country on holiday. It’s easier to eat, drink and be merry when you can speak with those around you. But what about the professional advantages?

I’ve been reading a few blogs and newspaper articles recently that discuss multilingualism.

• The Language Bridge
• Web pages for the EU Commissioner for Multilingualism
• Column in the Guardian about British linguistic skills

They have made me think about our profession, technical communication, and how it connects with other languages and cultures. We now work in a global marketplace and increasingly are involved with planning, writing, and distributing documentation that cross linguistic and cultural borders. Although most of us work and write in English, does it help us professionally as technical writers to be fluent in other languages? Are employers interested in such a skill?

If you’re based in Europe having another language certainly gives you more freedom to move between countries for work, particularly if you hold an EU passport. Fluency helps us deal with the various bureaucracies that invariably arrive when living in a different country. We become more aware of the diversity of life and can take part in it. We can speak with colleagues in their language. I’m fluent in French so can communicate with my colleagues in France, Belgium and Switzerland in their language, which they appreciate. Communication becomes more shared.

English today is the global linga franca. As a result many English speakers unfortunately don’t see the point in learning another language. Are many of the professional advantages of having a second language only apparent when you are the foreigner rather than the language? My last two jobs both preferred candidates to have a second language as well as good English. Admittedly both were in French-speaking countries.

Yet I think having another language is useful professionally even if you’re not based in a foreign country. We know what it’s like to read technical documents in a second language. Although such fluency isn’t a requirement when writing for a global market, it can help us to be more aware of the consequences of writing clear, concise, and direct information that is easy to translate as well as understood by those reading in their second language.

The practicalities of localisation can become more “alive”. Simply reading documents in other languages can help us appreciate the impact of such issues as text expansion due to translation (particularly around graphics) and inconsistent terminology. In some of my company’s datasheets I discovered that we had six different ways of writing “operating temperature” in English, which translated into four different ways in French and three in Spanish. Ouch!

If you’re fluent in more than one language, what advantages has it brought you professionally in your work as a technical communicator?