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.

Buy many products in Europe and inside the box you’ll probably find a printed multilingual manual. The manual could contain over a dozen languages. They can often elicit a groan from readers as they can initially be overwhelmed by all the languages in front of them.

This type of document is widely used in Europe, particularly for lower-cost hardware products. Its advantage is that the product can be packaged without knowing the eventual country to which it will be shipped, simplifying shipping and reducing costs.

These manuals are usually printed as a large folded sheet or as a small booklet. Due to space demands, page and font sizes tend be on the small side. They are often thrown out after use. As a result the cost of production can be an important issue.

In spite of their widespread use, we don’t often hear much about how they’re produced. Unlike the larger monolingual user manuals we all work on, these manuals are often more exposed to the cold realities of cost and size restrictions. So when planning a multilingual manual you should consider the following points:

Purpose

Will it be the only printed manual shipped with the product or is it intended as a quick installation guide with the full user guide to be include, for example, on a CD?

This will help you decide the type and extent of information required in the multilingual manual.

Space

How much space is available in the box for the printed manual when packed with the product and any other accompanying accessories and documents (such as WEEE and/or Battery Directive information sheets and CDs)?

This will determine the size and thickness of the printed manual with all required languages included, which in turn will impact how information can be presented.

Graphics

Do you have access to high quality graphics?

Usually these manuals communicate information in a very visual manner to reduce the amount of text needed. So the graphics need to be well drawn, descriptive and clear. They will often be describing hardware. If you can’t draw the graphics yourself, you’ll need the services of someone who can. To facilitate translation, graphics should only include text that doesn’t need to be translated such as measurements.

One way to save space is to present all the graphics in the front pages of the manual and then refer to them in the text of each language that follow after the graphics. Not always best in terms of usability but a compromise that at least ensures the information is provide in all the required languages in a limited space.

This type of documentation can reveal some of the cultural issues involved with producing international documentation. Europeans are more familiar than Americans with working from pictures. Europe is not (yet) as litigious a market as America so there may not always be the same legal demands for information to be explained in text format rather than split between graphics and text.

Budget

Are there budget limitations for producing and printing this manual?

Know what the printing budget will be since this document type is often used for lower cost products. As a result you may not be able to print in colour or use higher quality paper. Multilingual manuals tend to be printed in large print runs (perhaps several thousand at a time) so mistakes can be expensive to correct if they produce a lot of scrap documents. Don’t start writing this manual without knowing your production and cost restrictions.
How many languages will be included in a multilingual manual?

If you need to ship many languages with the product, the languages could be included in a single manual or split between two or more manuals. Including only a few languages in a manual makes it less intimidating and easier to use. However, printing two or more multilingual manuals to be shipped with a product will increase production costs, for which the budget may not always be available. There can sometimes be pressure to keep the number of items on the bill of materials for a product to a minimum.

Use the internationally recognised ISO language or country codes to identify the languages in a multilingual manual. Language codes are preferable to country codes as many countries share the same language. For the same reason, don’t use national flags to identify languages.

Love or hate them multilingual manuals will not be disappearing anytime soon. There’s a business need for them. So it’s important that we understand what makes them tick. I’ve done dozens over the years and enjoy the challenge each presents.

And you?

What’s been your experience of writing them? As a reader, which ones did you particularly like or dislike?

Last April, the eruption by the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull caused an ash cloud that affected 10 million people worldwide and 77% of European civil aviation airspace. Over 100,000 flights were cancelled during the eight days of the crisis.

One organisation at the centre of this event was Brussels-based Eurocontrol who are responsible for the safety of air navigation in Europe. Consequently they know where planes are taking off and landing across Europe.

How Eurocontrol responded to the crisis

Aurelie Valtat of Eurocontrol recently gave a presentation to the Belgian chapter of IABC on how that organisation used social media during the volcanic ash crisis.

Usually Eurocontrol is a B2B organisation—they deal with air traffic control and airlines. They rarely received questions from the public. The volcanic ash crisis pushed them onto the public stage. The public needed information about their flights and the airlines were too slow for them in providing it. If you remember, information was often changing by the hour.

Before the ash crisis, Eurocontrol received around one tweet a month from the public. However, during the crisis that jumped to several hundred a day.

Eurocontrol used its web site, press conferences, Twitter, and Facebook to communicate with the public during the volcanic ash crisis. To a lesser extent, it used LinkedIn.

The human face of a company

At its best, social media allows a company’s human side to show. Although they were not used to dealing directly with the public before the volcanic ash crisis, once it started, Eurocontrol moved quickly to provide up to date information on flights.

The Web is a great source of information in a crisis. Their web site had a 5000% increase in visits during this crisis.

They used Twitter to drive people to the web site for information and to release information quickly as the web site could take up to an hour to update. The advantage of Twitter is that it is real time information.

One challenge it faced was telling the public about its Twitter and Web sites. Few members of the public use Twitter. Here they were considerably helped by mainstream media directing the public to these sites. The top referral sites to Eurocontrol’s social media sites were BBC, Le Monde, and El Pais.

In one week, their Twitter followers jumped from 300 to 11,000 and their Facebook members increased from 2,000 to 4,000.

Although they received questions in several languages, they only answered tweets in English as this meant that the widest number of people could follow the answers. They didn’t have the resources to reply in multiple languages.

Sharing information

Another speaker described how he set up a Facebook site to help passengers stranded with him in Bangkok. It was impossible to get through on the telephone to airlines. He placed on it links to the EU legal information on consumer rights as few passengers knew their legal rights when stranded by an airline.

Prior to the volcanic ash crisis, social media was not integrated into any of Eurocontrol’s crisis communication plans. It is now.

Further information about this meeting organised by the IABC: Talking about social media.

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.

Han Yu, Assistant Professor, English Department, Kansas State University, and Gerald Savage, Professor, English Department, Illinois State University, are looking for interesting stories from technical communicators to publish in “Negotiating International and Cross-Cultural Technical Communication: Stories of Technical Communicators”.

Summary

We request story proposals of 300 words for an upcoming collection Negotiating International and Cross-Cultural Technical Communication: Stories of Technical Communicators. This collection is designed for technical communicators to tell their stories working in international and cross-cultural contexts, working for/with clients/colleagues from diverse cultural backgrounds, or writing/designing for audience from diverse cultural backgrounds. We hope this collection will be a venue for contributors to share their experiences and lessons-learned, to inform and educate fellow practitioners, and to demonstrate their value-add to employers and clients. Submissions that meet the scope of the collection will be followed up for full-length stories.

For more information on this and how to submit a proposal, read the full request on the ITC SIG website.

I’ve been reading up recently on agile environments. I don’t work in such an environment but have been struck at how often they discuss the importance of the office layout to encourage collaboration in a team. The preferred layout always cited is the open plan office.

The layout of the workplace does impact productivity. An open layout encourages communication between people. It’s a more dynamic place to work as it allows team members to interact more easily. The downside is it can be distracting if you need to concentrate. Cubicles encourage solo work, where less interaction is required. However, cubicles can discourage that cross-fertilisation of ideas and exchange of information that comes with close teamwork. Another disadvantage of cubicles is the potential risk, “Out of sight, out of mind”.

The culture of the workspace

There is also a cultural aspect to office layout to consider. Most Europeans work in open plan and most Americans work in cubicles. I’m not sure why this is. Which office layout you prefer may well depend on which you’re used to.

I’ve never worked in a cubicle. I’ve only worked in an individual office or in an open plan layout with up to six people. I’ve never worked in offices with large areas of open plan (+40 people).

Team benefits

In the agile environment you are located in your team. As my projects are determined by Product Management, I’m physically located with that team (I actually report to them). However, I don’t feel isolated from the other writers in the company, who are all located in other countries anyway. I’m in frequent contact with them by Instant Messenger and we chatter about tech comm. related topics and what work is like at our respective sites.

I’m an open plan person. I savour the opportunities to have ad hoc conversations with people, eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of the product managers around me and exchange ideas. I hear about customer evaluations as well as learn about the wider picture of product development and on doing business with suppliers (whose manuals I will be rewriting and with whom I will also be contact). I believe that this helps me collect a wide range of information to better focus the manuals I write and localise. I don’t want to work in a cubicle as I would find it isolating.

In my opinion, an open plan layout of, say, up to eight people is great for encouraging team collaboration. A larger team would probably need a careful review of the different types of workspaces that should be provided to balance team needs and solo work moments (for example a mix of individual desks, meeting desks, places for quiet work, hot desking…).

Coping with noise

Open plan can sometimes be distracting. There are four of us in the office and between us we have six mobile phones and four landline phones. We’ve reached a “gentleman’s agreement” not to use loud “amusing” dial tones on our mobile phones and to use the headsets provided for teleconferences (unless others are invited to listen in). If I really do need silence to concentrate when working on a project, I stay home that day and work from there.

Which layout do you prefer to help you do your work: Open plan or cubicle? What different types of office layout have you work in and which have helped you feel part of a team?

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.

Wow! An STC event that is covered by the Huffington Post. Wow! STC France and STC Transalpine deserve a round of applause louder than exploding volcanos for putting together such an excellent event! I didn’t attend, but I can feel the waves of excitement pouring out of Paris. It seems everyone had a fantastic time. Diana Railton tweeted:

The Content Strategy Forum in Paris was the best conference I’ve ever been to. Many thanks to @stcfrance @Wion and all presenters #csforum10

It wasn’t all cruises and champagne, however. It was also a matter of getting smarter about content strategy, as Rahel Bailie says in this CMS Wire article – It’s Time for a Strategic Content Lifecycle.

If you are in technical communication and know nothing about content strategy, you would do yourself and your career and your workplace a favor if you sat down and read – and studied – the articles and slides coming in the wake of this amazing conference. Rahel Bailie’s discussion of the content lifecycle is the perfect place to start your studies. That’s because her focus is on the beginning – the strategic analysis. The reason that this analysis is so important is because it kicks off the content lifecycle. Yes, there is a lifecycle to your content! Go read what she says, and then you’ll be just as eager as others are to see her slides from the conference as well as the future discussions that post promises.

(If you need a break from the reading now and then, get the visual experience from the pictures in the Flickr CS Forum 2010 group.)

If you are wondering what content strategy has to do with technical communication, let David Farbey share the messages that he took away from csforum10 – and we’re not talking about the ones from a ouija board! Keep an eye on David Farbey’s blog for future meditations about content strategy and technical communication. Like many attendees, he’s been overwhelmed by all the energy pouring out of the conference and needs a moment to digest. We’re just jealous and eager to hear his reflections!

Exploring Editorial Strategy is a topic that will make you sit up and take notice. You’ll be shouting hallelujah when Jeffrey MacIntyre, Predicate LLC sings the “content strategy gospel”.

It’s so good to see mobile addressed in Erin Scime’s presentation about the possible return of shovelware. I see so little discussion in technical communication circles that it makes me fear the topic of “mobile” is being neglected. It mustn’t be! Erin Scime’s presentation should clarify why.

As Eyjafjallajökull calms down and people arrive home, more articles will be written and more discussions will be started. Monitor this SlideShare collection from the conference and Rachel Lovinger’s Delicious bookmarks to collect all your favorite news from CS Forum.

Finally, here’s the link from Steve Rosenbaum’s article in the Huffington Post as Content Strategists Gather in Paris, which was originally published in Fast Company as Filter or Be Flooded: Do You Need a Content Strategist? – exposure of the good kind!

Take another bow, STC France and STC Transalpine. You have triggered a vibrant kind of seismic activity in the technical communication world this month!

I work in the manufacturing sector and many of our products are outsourced to suppliers for development and manufacture, to be sold under our company’s brand name. The English terms I come across in the software and manuals that I check can often be amusing in their originality. A Chinese supplier with whom we work called the term “Event” in a product’s firmware “Happening Time”. I don’t know why but the term “Happening time” tickles me. I still changed it to “Event”.

I’ve no idea how “Rule” became “Handle”.

I may find amusement in such mistakes but on the down side….

Over the years I’ve worked with over two dozen suppliers from around the world, most in Asia. Only two of these suppliers have used technical writers to do their manuals. One was in Canada and the other in Israel.

It was a few years back and at the time neither writing group in these two companies gave sufficient thought to the impact of localisation on their manuals (such as text expansion and embedded text in graphics) as they didn’t translate their work. Yet their companies were selling the products to other companies for resale under other brand names, and these companies often operate in multilingual markets. Such as my own company. I may have had to redo the layouts and graphics of their manuals for localisation, but the English was correct.

I hope that these two writing groups are now doing manuals that are easy to localise, even if they’re still not doing any translation themselves. Such a step would increase the value of their services to their respective companies, who are keen to expand internationally.

However, most of the “English” source documents I receive to customise for my company are written by engineers in non-English speaking countries. The level of English varies from “Nearly there” to “????”.

The standard localisation issues with text expansion, embedded text in graphics, and inconsistent terminology are obviously also present. The Tech Comm world may be a buzz with XML and DITA but Microsoft Word is doing great in the world of many companies. So is Normal style. These issues are easy, if perhaps time consuming, to fix.

What does shock me is how many companies release manuals and software with poor, at times incomprehensible, English. If you then plan to then translate the documents and software, poor English will then often mean even worse translations. And translating isn’t cheap.

Training technical writers isn’t the problem. It’s training companies to have higher expectations on the quality documentation and software they provide to customers. Customers matter. Being able to use a product easily matters. Crap English impacts your bottom line.

Companies also need to realise that being able to speak English sort of OK isn’t the same as being able to write it correctly. Users – and translators – can tell the difference.

I know that English-mother tongue or fluent writers aren’t easy to find in many of the new growing industrial areas of the world. One of our Chinese suppliers is now getting a Chinese engineer who lived in the US for several years to do their manuals. The English is better (from a low base line). It’s still foreign-flavoured English, but it is at least easier to understand and is a step in the right direction for the resources they have at hand. Realistically, the chances of them hiring a mother-tongue writer in their city are minimal. We still rewrite their documentation for our customers.

Last year, I attended the STC France annual conference. During the last session when the speakers were discussing how they thought our profession would evolve in the future, one speaker said that we would be spending more time rewriting other people’s work. I agree.

English is now the linga franca of international business. As a result, the quality of English is often suffering. The challenge we face is finding ways to improve written English in documentation, and to persuade companies it’s worth the investment. Let’s reduce the incidence of all those awful happening times.