STC in Europe has already done international events such as a successful trans European STC conference a few years back in London. The STC TransAlpine Chapter held annual conferences that crossed borders and boundaries and the STC France chapter has held several conferences with speakers and attendees from around the world. TCeurope holds annual conferences around Europe too (the most recent in Brussels.) Tekom has a great conference. Collectively we’ve a lot of experience at running international events that we can share. We attend each others events, usually at no extra cost thanks to INTECOM (so no reason to belong to multiple professional groups). Extend this interaction?

STC Europe also ran for several years a trans European technical publications competition in five languages across 10 countries. Many of our judges weren’t STC members. Some were members of other European tech comm bodies. We currently don’t do the competition. ISTC does one (English only). Perhaps there’s an opportunity for European tech comm bodies to do a joint international competition that covers several languages?

However, STC HQ still needs to improve its international outlook. As discussed in the GATF report, it doesn’t provide enough practical support to members based outside of North America. Let’s see how they respond to the report.

I worked with the editors on the templates to ensure that they facilitate localisation but it took a long time to get agreement on the templates to be used for the multilingual guides. Understanding the impact of text expansion on a small page was a frequent issue and my need for a simpler layout. Eventually we got there!

For example – a few years ago a major mobile phone company we were translating for suddenly introduced the term “Longhorn Data” into their manuals with no explanation is to what they meant by “Longhorn”.

When we asked them for clarification they said – “oh we just meant large chunks of data.” (we never did quite understand the need for th oblique reference to beef cattle) We then had to politely explain that whilst in America there was a slim chance users would catch the meaning, once translated this was going to be impossible to interpret. After reflection they changed the phrase to “large packet data” and everyone was happy.

My firm only does technical translations, and most of our translators are in fact technical writers themselves so we’ve got a wealth of experience to offer to clients when they are prepared to work with us as part of their team in this way.

We both clearly have had to deal too often with unplanned multilingualism in documentation. As you say, the serious impact of text expansion really becomes apparent when dealing with limited space and small page sizes. Although my company style guide alerts writers to this issue, it doesn’t seem to help much. Many of our writers have difficulty visualising their writing when it expands 30% or more and how that can impact layout. The breathing space in single language manuals often just isn’t there.

Developing templates for multilingual manuals has been a challenge for us at times as editors who do the templates may not always understand just how serious it is to:

- design the layout so that the page count is as low as possible so the the translated printed manual still fits in the box with the product

- plan for a small page size. It isn’t the same as working with US letter/A4. I’ve had to deal with a template for a 4.5 x 7.2in pocket guide designed just like our US letter user manual (monolingual & PDF distribution) but which had to accommodate 6+ languages when printed.

- plan for how much small blocks of text can expand (often over 100%). As you say, this can be a challenge when dealing with text associated with graphics. The longest word I’ve even had to handle was in Estonian; “fire control panel” became a single word with over 30 characters!

Multilingual manuals are often low cost and many writers may not consider the cost impact of their work. What seems fine in one language may become nearly unusable without major rework when more languages are added.

As a translation business we find it frustrating when the author of a technical text creates needless problems through poor layout in this way. There is a strong economic and environmental case for getting this right. If you can keep the number of pages under control (we advise really bad offenders on optimisation for print)then you save cost in print and transport weight as well as trees and fuel.