STC Summit Chicago - Summary of Sessions I

So I'm finally getting around to writing about the actual content of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit -- i.e., the sessions I attended. Eight Summit sessions were related to translation/international communication, although I only attended six of them. Here is a summary of the first three of these. I'll summarize the second three next week and provide an overview of sessions related to freelancing/consulting the following week.

• Advanced Localization for Technical Communicators by David Sommer
• Translation Technology: MT, TM and Translation Reuse by Lisa Pietrangeli
• Plain Language for the Technical Writer by Bruce Poropat

David Sommer of Net-Translators spoke about Advanced Localization for Technical Communicators. He focused on localizing IT-related material, including user interfaces and help systems. The presentation provided me with an overview of how translation agencies handle the entire process, rather than only seeing the translation portion I normally work on.

Lisa Pietrangeli of ThirtySix Software explained Translation Technology: MT, TM and Translation Reuse. She emphasized the importance of consistency in writing the source text and explained how poorly written text impacts the use of translation tools. None of this is news to translators, of course, but the Q&A portion offered me an opportunity to introduce myself to a room full of potential translation buyers.

Bruce Poropat of Technical Communications explained how to “translate” convoluted documents into plain English in Plain Language for the Technical Writer. While the primary goal of plain English is not to make text easier to translate, that is frequently a secondary benefit of the conversion process. In this session I learned about how the process of making a given text more accessible to, for example, consumers, actually works.

Next week: Summary of remaining sessions related to translation