STC Summit Chicago - Writing for Global Audiences

As promised, here is the text of my presentation, "Writing for Global Audiences", at the recent Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit in Chicago. In Part I, Part II and Part III of this series I reviewed conference sessions related to translation and freelancing.

Writing for Global Audiences

by Barbara Jungwirth, reliable translations llc
at the 59th STC Annual Conference, May 20-23, 2009 in Chicago, Ill.

Hi. I'm Barbara Jungwirth of reliable translations. I translate and edit software documentation and other technical documents between German and English. Before becoming a translator, I used to write software documentation.

Increasingly, English-language technical documents intended for global audiences are no longer translated into multiple languages. Instead, technicians and others are expected to be fluent enough in English to understand these texts in their original language. While these professionals generally know the English terminology for their specific field, their overall command of the language may not be quite so fluent. Add to this the fact that the English spoken in, say, New Delhi or Capetown differs considerably from that spoken in New York or Chicago and you can see how a document written for an American audience may be difficult to understand elsewhere.

But if you are mindful of some issues that may pose problems to non-native English speakers you can greatly increase the likelihood that global audiences will understand your document. In this presentation I will outline two areas of potential problems:

• Writing issues - that is word choice, grammar and syntax
and
• Formatting issues - that is text formatting and images

Finally, I will briefly talk about evaluating how your text may fare with a global audience.

Writing Issues

One of the most important writing issues is consistency in word choice: use the same term for the same concept. If a widget is a widget in the help system overview, that same widget should not have morphed into a thingamajigg in the section on installing widgets and a gizmo in the appendix about different widget types.

A corollary to this rule is to use standard terms with standard spelling. If the widget is spelled "w-e-e-g-i-t", a reader unfamiliar with the term cannot look it up in a dictionary and is forever left to wonder what this item might be. Also, minimize the use of words with the same spelling, but different meanings. These are sometimes confused even by native speakers and are often difficult to distinguish for non-native speakers.

Similarly, use the literal meaning of words, and avoid wordplay and metaphors. That said, many modern computer terms are, in fact, non-literal versions of older words -- e.g., mouse -- and universally understood in their new meaning. So, don't try and find a more "literal" word to describe a computer mouse -- when reading a manual, no one will think of the furry animal when encountering this term.

Don't use words in non-standard ways, such as using nouns as verbs and vice versa. When it comes to grammar, most languages are not as flexible as English. When reading foreign-language texts, many people subconsciously translate into their native language. The closer you stick to "schoolbook English", the easier it will be for non-native readers to translate the text for themselves.

Long convoluted sentences with many dependent clauses are difficult to understand even for native speakers. Complex concepts with many variables can still be explained in a series of sentences. Each of these sentences should refer to the concept explained in the previous sentence by name. Non-specific pronouns, such as "this," are harder to interpret than if the specific term to which "this" refers is repeated.

Most non-native speakers reading technical documents in English will be quite familiar with the terminology specific to their particular field. They may, however, not know colloquial expressions common in documents written for U.S. readers. This applies especially to expressions referring to sports, movies, or cultural icons. References to politics and religion, as well as anything even slightly off-color, should obviously be avoided when writing for people from different cultures.

Keep in mind that time zones, units of measure and national holidays differ among countries. Some of these references may be unavoidable, but don't add unnecessary references to location-specific items. In particular, don't provide unnecessary measurements. Since most of the world operates on the metric system, the reader will need to convert all such measurements.

Avoid acronyms and abbreviations as much as possible. If they are unavoidable, provide a list of abbreviations. That, however, does not necessarily apply to very common acronyms, particularly when the acronym may be better known than the phrase from which it derived (e.g., UNESCO).
Write in a formal tone. Many languages distinguish between two (or more) forms of address, depending on the degree of familiarity between speaker and addressee (or writer and reader). Being too formal is rarely considered offensive, while being too familiar can offend. That said, don't start using archaic phrases or stilted language. Imagine you are addressing, say, your local mayor -- assuming you are not from a small town where the mayor is your personal friend. You wouldn't call him or her "His Excellency", but you wouldn't slap his or her back, either.

Formatting Issues

While it is relatively easy to understand how vocabulary and syntax issues may affect understanding, formatting questions are often overlooked. Bulleted or numbered lists may be a better way to illustrate a set of options than a long paragraph describing the choices available. Tables, too, can present the relationship between distinct pieces of information in a fairly intuitive way.

Not all images are worth a thousand words, but procedures can sometimes be summarized in flow charts that require little linguistic knowledge. That said, writers and designers need to be mindful that a left-to-right progression is not necessarily obvious for readers who come from right-to-left (or top-to-bottom) languages. The significance of specific symbols may also not be apparent to everyone. Most U.S. readers will recognize an eight-sided red sign with white lettering to mean "Stop", but the corresponding road sign in Japan is triangular and in Tonga the sign is a white circle with a red triangle inside.

Tonga	Japan	US

When creating documents that will be read online also take into account slower download speeds and differing standard fonts on non-English computer systems. A page that downloads quickly over your broadband connection and displays nicely in Verdana may look quite different on a machine running the Russian version of Windows and using a dial-up connection. Whenever possible, try to test online documentation in the countries where it will be mostly viewed.

Evaluating Your Work

Besides trying to test under local technical conditions, it's a good idea to have colleagues from the countries where the document will be mostly used read your text. What seems perfectly clear and understandable to you may not be so for someone coming from a different language. If people who actually live in the target countries are not available, native speakers of the languages in question who live in the U.S. are a good second choice. Failing that, people familiar with the native languages of the people likely to read the text may be able to point out significant problems.

Two other presentations at this Summit cover related topics: Bruce Poropat will speak about "Plain Language for Technical Writers" immediately following this progression and John R. Kohl, the author of The Global English Style Guide will be speaking tomorrow at 11:30. I have also prepared a short list of additional resources, which you are welcome to take.

Resources

• Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. "How to Write for an International Audience". Technical Communication Center (Jan. 29, 2009). www.technicalcommunicationcenter.com/2009/01/29/writing-for-an-international-audience/.
• Gerald J. Alred et. al. Handbook of Technical Writing, 9th ed. (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press), 2009.
• John R. Kohl. The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, Inc.), 2008.
• Michael Kriz. "10 Tips for Writing International Technical Content". The Content Wrangler (July 8, 2011). http://thecontentwrangler.com/2011/07/08/10-tips-for-writing-international-technical-content/.
• Philip Rubens. Science & Technical Writing: A Manual of Style, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Routledge), 2001.
• Edmond H. Weiss. The Elements of International English Style: A Guide to Writing Correspondence, Reports, Technical Documents, Internet Pages for a Global Audience. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), 2005.
• Dovie Wylie. "Tips for Writing Globally". Multilingual Computing, 10.1 (Oct. 1998). www.multilingual.com/articleDetail.php?id=515.
• Sun Technical Publications. Read Me First! A Style Guide for the Computer Industry, 3rd ed. (Sun Technical Publications).

PS: This was a short "Progression" session. I will be holding a full 45-minute session on the same topic at the tekom conference in Wiesbaden Germany, October 23-25.

STC Summit Chicago - Summary of Sessions III

This is the third in a series of three posts about sessions I attended at the recent Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit. In Part I of this series I reviewed presentations by David Sommer, Lisa Pietrangeli and Bruce Poropat. Part II covered presentations by Michael Fritz, John Kohl and myself. This post summarizes sessions related to freelancing/consulting.

• Transform a Prospect Meeting Into a Signed Contract by Teresa Stover
• Building Your Professional Network - Beyond the Social Media Maze by Jenna Moore
• SMM101: 5 Cs of Managing Your Presence by Louellen Coker
• Building the New Resume by Brenda Huettner

Teresa Stover of Stover Writing Services explained how to Transform a Prospect Meeting Into a Signed Contract. Translators working through agencies will probably not go through the more traditional multi-step sales process for a project. But the insights provided by Ms. Stover may be helpful when trying to acquire long-term direct clients.

Jenna Moore of SAS Institute spoke about Building Your Professional Network - Beyond the Social Media Maze. Networking is certainly one marketing tactic all independent workers need to master. In this mini-workshop Ms. Moore guided the audience through creating individual lists of specific networking possibilities and addressed how to follow up on that list.

Louellen Coker of Content Solutions provided advice on social media marketing in SMM101: 5 Cs of Managing Your Presence. Since I am active on several social media platforms (blog, Twitter, LinkedIn), I was particularly interested in this presentation. The 5Cs are: clarity - concise - cohesive - consistent - connected, and they all apply to developing and communicating one's brand.

Brenda Huettner of P-N Designs, Inc., explained how to become known as an expert on various platforms in Building the New Resume. Her advice was to participate in LinkedIn and Facebook groups and to write regular blog posts showcasing one's knowledge. She also advised freelancers to highlight how easy they are to work with.

Next week: My entire presentation on "Writing for Global Audiences".

STC Summit Chicago - Summary of Sessions II

This is the second in a series of three posts about sessions I attended at the recent Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit. In Part I of this series I reviewed presentations by David Sommer, Lisa Pietrangeli and Bruce Poropat.

• ISO/IEC 82079 -- The International Standard for Technical Communication by Michael Fritz
• Introduction to Global English by John Kohl
• Writing for Global Audiences by Barbara Jungwirth

Michael Fritz of tekom/tcworld GmbH spoke on ISO/IEC 82079 -- The International Standard for Technical Communication. tekom is a German organization similar to STC that has been working on this standard. The standard, which is more commonly used in Europe, includes sections on translation quality, as well as specifying that "instructions for use shall be supplied in the official language of the country of sale". We translators can use this language to advocate for translating materials that might otherwise remain only in the source language.

John Kohl of SAS Institute summarized his seminal book The Global English Style Guide in his presentation Introduction to Global English. His guidelines for writing for audiences across the world include: conform to standard English, simplify your writing style, use modifiers clearly and carefully, make pronouns clear and easy to translate, eliminate unusual terms and phrases, adhere to standard punctuation and capitalization, and use syntactic cues. Text that follows these rules is not only easier to understand, but is also easier to translate.

My own presentation, Writing for Global Audiences, was part of the Writing and Editing Progression. Progressions provide 6-10 concurrent 20 minute round-table discussions on various related topics. I provided a brief overview of both writing and formatting issues to consider when addressing readers who are not native English speakers, and outlined how to evaluate whether the text can be properly understood by its intended audience. I will post the text of my speech here later this month.

Next week: Presentations related to freelancing/consulting.

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

Back From Chicago With Lessons Learned

After an interesting, but also exhausting STC Summit and reinstalling everything on my desktop (starting with the operating system), I'm back to more regular work. A few lessons learned from this trip:

An iPad alone is insufficient equipment if you turned in translations just before leaving. As it turned out, two of my clients needed additions to work I had sent just before I left for Chicago. Fortunately this time I was staying at the conference hotel, so I could scoot up to my room during Monday's lunch break to deal with these texts. When packing I had decided at the last minute that I didn't need both the iPad and netbook, and left the latter at home. As a result I had to translate without CAT tools or even a decent keyboard. I had brought my bluetooth keyboard for the iPad and got the job done, but typing with timelag to the screen and without being able to switch to a German keyboard was frustrating. Next time I'll bring the netbook (and probably not need it).

It is worth paying for mobile access to CRM (customer relationship management) data. Sage ACT!'s service, where the data resides in the "cloud" still worries me, but there is an iPad app called "iTract for ACT!" that synchs with the ACT! database on my computer. I downloaded a trial version, but haven't yet had a chance to test it. If it lets me input the business cards I'm accumulating at these events while waiting for my plane, then sync them with my desktop when I get back, it will be worth buying.

There is an Android app called "PDAnet" that lets me use my phone to connect other devices to the internet. I should figure out whether there is a way to hook my iPad up to my phone. That way I could be much more productive while waiting for 2-hour plane delays caused by bad weather in New York. After all, there is only so much online work one can do on a smartphone's pull-out mini keyboard and mini screen.

Do you have any other road warrior tips for running your business while not in your (home) office? Please share them in the comments section below.

Client Acquisition and Relationship Management

No, not that kind of relationship. I am talking about keeping track of clients and potential clients, not managing my personal life. Back in the Fall I bought Sage ACT! to track potential clients and my interactions with them. While there are plug-ins for the software to interact with other standard applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, I have a number of problems with my version of ACT!. For one thing, the supposed integration with Outlook doesn't work very well and doesn't recognize e-mails sent by other people within the same organization, unless I set each person up as a separate contact. That's quite a task for larger language service providers with many different project managers.

Besides, I have moved away from Outlook and now mostly use Gmail to manage my e-mail. The e-mail address connected to my website domain name forwards to a Gmail account that I can easily access from my phone or any browser. That greatly simplifies negotiating projects when I'm not sitting at my computer - for example while having my morning coffee (at which point it's already early afternoon in Europe).

I am therefore looking again for another customer relationship management (CRM) solution. Samantha Gluck mentioned on Twitter a blog post with a list of some 20 CRM solutions for freelancers, with a brief blurb and links to all of them. This yielded a couple of promising options: Work[etc] and Insight.ly. The first one is expensive (at least for a one-person company), but includes a billing solution. The second one has a free version, but no billing module and seems less customizable than Work[etc].

Unfortunately both of them are cloud-based (i.e., hosted on someone else's server). I suppose this is necessary if I want to be able to access this information on the go, for example at a conference, but I'm not sure how I feel about entrusting my client contact information to "the cloud". On the other hand, my gmail contacts are already on Google's servers and all my e-mails are stored on my web hosting company's and/or Google's computers. So this may not make much of a difference.

About client acquisition: a few posts ago, I wrote about creating a second, more client-focused blog and alternating posts between this blog and the other one. In preparation I started to re-write some of the older posts from this blog that might be interesting to potential clients. But while uploading a new photo of myself (courtesy of my daughter and son-in-law who took and cropped/processed the photo, respectively) I realized that most social media sites only let you list one blog URL. So now I am rethinking the entire two-blog concept. Back to the drawing board, then ... (By the way, the new picture is in the bio section to the right of this post.)

Note: I will be at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Chicago next week and may not post next Wednesday, unless I have enough time (and an internet connection) at O'Hare before my flight back.

Preparing for the STC Conference

The annual Society for Technical Communication Summit in Chicago is a little more than 2 weeks away. So my preparations are in full swing. I wrote my presentation based on average words/minute for public speaking. Turns out, I talk fast (no surprises there, my friends and family would say). So I'm 2 minutes short. Either I slow down, or I write more text. Knowing myself, I suppose I better opt for the latter.

Meanwhile, STC created a social media app just for the conference where attendees can set up profiles, follow others, post their schedules (only official sessions, though), etc. Great networking opportunity, but it can be time-consuming. But then, I suppose, networking takes time in general.

So I said in an earlier post that I'd try and have the client-focused blog up and running by the time I depart for Chicago. I have been working on writing/re-writing posts for that, but I'm not sure I'll have the time to actually set up the blog before I leave. Maybe I'll find time at the conference to do it (one can always hope!).

Another item on my to-do list is to get a decent picture of myself for posting online and using in other promotional material. Again, I'd like to have this done (and up on my website, the conference social media app, etc.) before I leave. Looking for photographers online earlier today, I had a brainstorm: Macy's here in New York has free makeup sessions in its cosmetics section (where they then try to sell you expensive makeup stuff), as well as a photo studio. Maybe I can combine the two, get a professional makeup job on the first floor, then a professional picture on whatever floor the studio is on. If it's digital, I should be able to get it while I wait, right?

Then, of course, there is notifying regular clients of my absence, preparing flight and hotel information for my family, checking that my business clothes are clean and ironed, etc. Not to mention practicing my presentation, actual packing, backing up everything and making sure I have all the files and applications I might need while in Chicago.

I wonder how frequent conference/event speakers handle all these preparations (and the attendant stress) ...