Global Talk

Localization World is the leading conference for localization and translation professionals, and the next US conference, Localization World is in Madison, Wisconsin, October 13-15, 2008.

This conference builds on the success of eleven previous conferences and continues the 2008 theme of “Innovating Localization Business Models.” Localization World conferences are 3-day events and more than 500 localization and translation professionals attend.

For more information please email info@localizationworld.com or visit http://www.localizationworld.com 

The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market, by ITC SIG member John R. Kohl, has recently been published by SAS Press.

This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English.

Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics:

• Ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent
• Ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities
• How to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand
• Punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient
• How language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard

Author John R. Kohl has worked at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. For the past several years, John has devoted much of his time to terminology issues and to refining the Global English guidelines. As a linguistic engineer, John customizes and supports tools and processes that help make SAS documentation more consistent, easier to translate, and easier for non-native speakers of English to understand. John has been interested in machine translation and other language technologies for many years, and he is a charter member of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.

You can view the table of contents, a sample chapter, and reviewers’ comments at http://support.sas.com/kohl. You can also order the book from that site, though you can get it at a discounted price through other online booksellers.

25th Practical Conference on Communication
 
October 10 - 11, 2008
 
The Chattanoogan Hotel and Conference Center
Chattanooga, Tennessee

Call for Papers
 
“Technical Communication in a Global Economy” is the theme for the Practical Conference on Communication this year.
 
You are invited to submit a proposal for a workshop, discussion, or presentation on practical strategies for effective international technical communication.
 
For sample topics, submission details, and more, please visit http://stc-etc.org/pcoc_call.asp.
 
The deadline for submissions is July 7, 2008.

As the ITC SIG manager, I wanted to thank all of the volunteers who helped with the ITC/GALA Pavilion this year.  We had a nice bit of traffic, and we had some lovely comments from folks participating in the sponsor activities and the Passport.  I remember a couple of women in particular said, “We never would have known about localization at all, except we wanted to do the Passport.  Thanks for educating us!”  

The winner of the  Passport activity was Lisa Rowan (name released with permission), and she is very excited!  

Thanks, too, to all who came to the ITC breakfast meeting. There was good energy in the room, and I truly appreciate all of the folks who stepped forward to take on some volunteer work for the ITC SIG.  I feel some good things are coming along this year.

In particular, I want to thank Laura Brandon who was so valiant in helping me put together the Pavilion. She’s with GALA, but she gets an ITC crown from me. As well, Phil Gray was so very helpful to me all during the hours of the Pavilion, willing to take on any ol’ task that came along. It was much appreciated.

Our sponsors were great, and I had a great time connecting with the via the Pavilion and at their booths. We look forward to working with them in the future. This year, we were sponsored by TOIN, LinguaLinx, TransPerfect, CETRA, Localization World, International Communication by Design, MultiLingual , OmniLingua, and SH3 (in no particular order). We truly appreciate their participation in the Pavilion and the Passport activity…and we hope it was a fruitful partnership with them, as well.

–Traci Nathans-Kelly ITC SIG Manager

Here, we can see folks paricipating in LinguaLinx’s Wheel of Fortune! at the Pavilion.

The 2008 STC Annual Conference featured a panel on international collaboration. Anne Gentle has posted her notes.

Linked below is a PDF of  ITC activities for the 2008 conference.  Included in this document are also sessions/talks/ that are of particular interest to ITCers.

ITC activities and sessions, STC 2008 conference

Contact the ITC manager (Traci Nathans-Kelly) if you have other items of interest to add.

Highlights:
STC Summit, 2008: Philadelphia, PA, USA
Sessions and Activities of Interest:
International Technical Communication

Every day, all Exhibit Hall hours, the  International Pavilion is open!  Come visit the Pavilion and participate in the Passport activity, which has a grand prize of a $500 airline voucher!Your Passport activity card will be in your conference bag or you can pick one up at the International Pavilion. Sponsored by ITC and GALA! 

International Pavilion Speakers and Activities
Monday
11:00am—Bob Caskey of OmniLingua
11:30am—Aki Ito of TOIN
2:00pm—Bob Caskey of OmniLingua
Tuesday
10:00am—Aki Ito of TOIN
11:30am—Mark Lawyer of LinguaLinx presents Wheel of Fortune!  ITC style!
12:00-1:00—ITC SIG Luncheon
1:30-2:30—ITC Progression (see below)
3:00pm—Mark Lawyer of LinguaLinx presents Jeopardy!  ITC style!
Wednesday
10:00am—Passport due at International Pavilion
11:00am—Passport winner announced!
 
STC Sessions
Monday, June 2
Communication Strategies of Successful Virtual Teams
3:30-4:30 PM  (Room: 103B)
Format: Discussion
Skill Level: All
Effective technical communications are paramount for successful virtual teams. Add diversity of cultures, locations, and functional ability, and you have strategic communication decisions to make. Come learn from some veterans. 

When Did Google Become a Verb? American English as a Moving Target
5:00-6:00 PM  (Room: 112AB)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: All
American English changes fast, and words that today are considered slang or mashed together can appear in dictionaries tomorrow. Plus, technology tests the bounds of terminology and usage. This session helps tech communicators make usage decisions. 

How Quality at the Source Affects Global Customer Satisfaction
5:00-6:00 PM  (Room: 103A)
Format: Presentation
Apart from offering the desired product/service, a global organization must emphasize all stages of customer communication. A satisfying experience happens only when communication is clear, consistent, error-free, and in the customers’ native language. This session focuses on new trends and technologies in the forefront of customer communication. We’ll discuss processes that integrate the whole linguistic supply chain, with special focus on authoring assistance.

Tuesday, June 3
Unifying Content Development and Localization at Palm
9:00-10:00 AM  (Room: 103A)
Format: Case Study
Skill Level: All
This case study looks at what happened when Palm made a dramatic shift to marry two antagonistic organizations in order to improve its ability to serve global audiences. By tightly integrating informatino development and localization, Palm has been able to increase the volume of accessible content without sacrificing quality.
 

Global Ideas and Global Information: Creating Content for a Worldwide Audience
9:00-10:00 AM  (Room: 111AB)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: All
Information today is inherently global information. Today’s organization, however, can be overwhelmed with the choices for global authoring, including structured versus unstructured authoring, XML and DITA, about using tools to bring style guides to life, or about improving authoring consistency, quality, and efficiency. Learn about best practices and the exciting solutions from Adobe and SDL that make authoring for a worldwide audience simple and easy.

Cross-cultural Communication Issues
10:30-11:30 AM  (Room: 106AB)
Format: Research Report
Skill Level: All
Two research reports examine international issues. The first examines the impacts of globalization on documents written in China for the international market, using rhetorical analysis, content analysis and visual analysis. The second analyzes changes in graphics between the English and Spanish versions of medical pamphlets.

Authoring for Globalization (Processes and Controls)
10:30-11:30am
Translation and localization of content are often managed operationally, but not strategically. How can we bring visibility to top management? What value do we provide, and how do we demonstrate it? And, most important, what makes your CEO excited about what you are accomplishing for the organization through globalizing its business processes?

Pictures & Profits: Innovations in Visual Instruction and Multi-ethnic Usability Research
10:30-11:30 AM  (Room: 113A)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: All
Learn visual design and international usability research strategies that helped build three innovative, visual guides. From building the guides to running the research, learn how simple, cheap ideas can lead to spectacular profits.

Convergence of Authoring and Translation in the Web 2.0 World
10:30-11:30 AM  (Room: 102A)
Format: Discussion
Skill Level: All
The concept of Web 2.0 is gaining much attention in the popular media. What impact do new technologies and workflows stemming from the next generation Web have on the way technical authors and translators work together

Working in Multicultural Environments
1:30-2:30 PM  (Room: 105AB)
Format: Progression
Skill Level: All
International issues that encumber the everyday technical communicator can be overwhelming. Experiences from experts who have knowledge of these issues and some resolutions can be of help to all.

Developing Content for the International Marketplace
1:30-2:30pm
Need to develop content once that is applicable to both the domestic and international markets? What do you need to know to write once and use everywhere? This session will show you what caveats, strategies, and best practices you can employ to meet global, diverse users expectations in your documentation.

Why Can’t My Software Talk to My CMS?: Why Open Standards for Multilingual Document Production Matter to You
3:00-4:00pm
Open standards are like the air we breathe: you only notice them when they aren’t there. In technology-driven fields, like multilingual document authoring and production, they play an especially important role by allowing tools and processes to work together rather than in conflict with each other. In this session a panel of experts will discuss the various standards, their impact on technical communication processes and workflows, and what you as a technical communicator need to know to make effective use of these standards.

Doing More With Less: Optimizing a Localization Budget
3:00-4:00 PM  (Room: 109B)
Format: Case Study
Fluke Corporation, a manufacturer of hand-held devices, planned to localize its content into nine languages; the budget only allowed five. Using ABREVE from Translations.com, the content retained usability and accuracy, and was localized into seven languages.

Improving Source Content Quality for Global Audiences
4:30-5:30 PM  (Room: 109B)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: All
Find out how Avaya implemented global authoring strategies to dramatically improve authoring productivity. By automating stye guide and reuse checks, the time and cost of global authoring have been greatly reduced.

Delivering on the Promise of Lower Localization Costs
4:30-5:30 PM  (Room: 113C)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: Advanced Topic
Lowering localization costs requires more than writing, translation, and technology best practices. SMEs, vendors, and writers must be managed effectively. This case study analyzes cost metrics, lessons learned, and the reality of localization projects.

Wednesday, June 4
International Collaboration in Technical Communication
9:00-10:00 AM  (Room: 113A)
Format: Discussion
Skill Level: All
As communication technologies improve, the barriers of geography are becoming less significant. Geographically separated groups are being replaced by collaborative teams that cross cultural, geographic, and time-zone boundaries. This panel features participants and managers of collaborative teams that have spanned the globe. Come to hear their advice and success stories.

10:00am—Passport Activity due at the International Pavilion!

11:00am—Passport Activity winner announced!

Globalizing Garmin: Finding the Way and Other Points
10:30-11:30 AM  (Room: 108B)
Format: Featured Speaker
Skill Level: Advanced Topic
 Spent a million dollars lately? Whoever said talk is cheap obviously didn’t have it translated! Learn how to establish a localization group in your company and factors you should consider.

Documentation Goes Global
10:30-11:30 AM  (Room: 102A)
Format: Featured Speaker
Skill Level: All
The ability to produce high quality and accurately localized documentation quickly and cheaply can make or break a successful product launch. Aberdeen Group’s Documentation Goes Global study found that leading companies launch products with localized documentation up to three working months faster than their peers while simultaneously controlling localization spend. Come find out how!

Translation Management Solution (TMS) Benefits During Localization
1:30-2:30 PM  (Room: 108B)
Format: Presentation
Skill Level: All
Translation Management Systems (TMS) are making inroads to enhance localization processes, communications, and meeting requirements. A must-attend session if you’re involved in localization and don’t know what TMS is.

Pictures from STC 2007’s International Pavilon!

Menno D.T. de Jong, PhD has been selected as the new Editor-in-Chief of Technical Communication, the quarterly, peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Technical Communication. De Jong is currently the director of undergraduate and masters programs in communication at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, where he earned his doctorate.    

“We are extremely pleased to have a man of his global reputation to lead the journal to the next level,” said Susan Burton, STC executive director. De Jong has been guest editor for IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication as well as two Dutch academic journals of communication, and a member of seven editorial boards. He has been both a reviewer and prolific author of more than 100 papers for journals and edited books.

De Jong’s vision for Technical Communication is to strengthen the journal’s identity as an outlet for high quality research articles and to be an intermediary between academics and practitioners. He is a strong believer that journal articles must have a clear relevance for technical communicators. De Jong will be in the STC booth with Intercom Editor Ed Rutkowski during STC’s Technical Communication Summit in Philadelphia as part of “Meet the Editors,” an opportunity to discuss ideas for articles, learn more about contributing to the publications, or to simply provide feedback.

De Jong succeeds long-time editor George Hayhoe and was selected after an intensive search by STC.

Originally posted in Tieline.  Posted here with permission.

As the STC conference approaches, you will be seeing more communication notices from the ITC Leadership Board. General information of ITC-based activities at the conference can be seen below by date.

INTERNATIONAL PAVILION (ITC AND GALA)
We are very excited about our main activity for the year: the International Pavilion, inside of the Exhibit Hall at the conference. We have nine sponsors this year, along with GALA and support from STC! During the conference, sponsors will have speakers talking at the Pavilion at various times along with other activities, like the Passport activity, detailed below.

PASSPORT ACTIVITY
ITC and GALA are sponsoring the Passport to International Technical Communication activity. With a grand prize of a $500 airline voucher, we hope that this activity will pull STC conference attendees to the International Pavilion to learn more about international tech comm while also pushing traffic to our sponsors in the Exhibit Hall. The Passport will be in every attendee conference bag, so there will be a good amount of exposure for the Pavilion, ITC, GALA, and international tech comm overall.

PAVILION HOSTS NEEDED
The International Pavilion could use some help in staffing the hours open.
Pavilion hosts are asked to:
–arrive at the time committed
–greet passers-by with info about ITC, GALA, and the Pavilion Passport Activity
–announce any sponsor speakers that may be presenting during your shift

Pavilion hosts will not:
–be speakers themselves (unless they are with a Pavilion sponsor). We are only looking for hosts to be a presence in the International Pavilion. There is no prep needed.
–have to do any clean up.
–leave the Pavilion unattended (we will have some expensive equipment there…).

If you are interested, please email Traci Nathans-Kelly (ITC manager) . For the most part, we need Pavilion hosts during Monday and Tuesday from 9am to 4pm, usually in half hour or 1hour shifts. You are welcome to pair up with a friend!

We also try to have ITC folks identify themselves as possible language translators for any conference attendees that may need additional support. We provide buttons to ITC members that they can wear on their conference badges that identify them as a translator. If you are interested, again, please let me know by May 5, 2008.

OTHER WAYS TO VOLUNTEER
We would love to be able to provide to ITC members a targeted list of session that may be of interest to ITC members. If you would be interested in creating this list, please return an email to Traci Nathans-Kelly. As well, if you are presenting at the conferemce, let me know and I will start a listing, too, to send around to ITC membership.

——————–

SCHEDULE (not complete, but a good start)
STC Annual Summit: ITC activities and opportunities for ITC SIG members

June 1
–Welcome Reception (for all STC members) 7-8:15pm in the Convention Center
–Leadership Day 8am-5pm (see STC website)
–Set up for International Pavilion, time tbd

June 2
–International Pavilion (ITC and GALA) opens in Exhibit Hall, 10:30am-6pm
–International Reception 6pm-7pm, Exhibit Hall (tentative)

June 3
–7:30am to 8:30am: ITC SIG meeting, Marriott room 302, for ITC Leadership Board
–International Pavilion in Exhibit hall open 9am-6pm
–ITC Progression, 1:30-2:30, room TBD
–ITC SIG luncheon at 12pm-1pm

June 4
–International Pavilion in Exhibit Hall open 9am-1:15pm
–ITC/GALA Pavilion Passport activity due at Intl Pavilion at 10am
–Drawing for Passport winner at 11am
–Break down of Pavilion structures, etc.

If you are a technical writer, editor, communicator, or translator, you are invited to participate in a North Dakota State University research project conducted by Bruce Maylath, from the NDSU Department of English, who is investigating the extent to which translation and technical writing may be overlapping or merging. If you are a translator or technical communicator/writer, you are invited to participate in this study here .

If you decide to participate, the survey takes only 5-10 minutes to answer the questions. The survey will help professionals in the translation and technical communication fields understand how their jobs overlap. The survey involves no risks to participants. Any information that is obtained in connection with this study is anonymous and cannot be identified with you. Your participation is voluntary. Your decision whether or not to participate will not affect your relationship with your employer, your clients, or North Dakota State University. If you decide to participate, you are free to withdraw your consent and discontinue participation at any time without penalty. The survey will be available until 10 May 2008. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Bruce Maylath at 701-231-7161 or Bruce.Maylath@ndsu.edu.
–
Bruce Maylath, Ph.D.
Professor, Dept. of English
320-D Minard Hall, North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND 58105 USA

By Geoff Hart, Associate Fellow, Montreal Chapter

I first realized I had a problem with this language thing when I returned to my hometown of Montreal in 1993, after many years spent in the English monoculture of Ontario. Quebec is a primarily French province, and although there’s a large English community in Montreal, Montrealers tend to communicate in a tasty mixture of French and English known as franglais (from francais for French and anglais for English). The local dialect of colloquial French is known as joual—a mispronunciation of cheval, which means horse (i.e., the worker’s language). You’ll have to hold most of a bagel (another Montreal specialty) in your mouth as you pronounce cheval to see how it transforms into joual. Add to this the disconcerting tendency of Montrealers to switch promiscuously between English, French, franglais, and joual at the drop of a preposition, depending on which idiom is most suitable at any given moment, and you can imagine my linguistic disorientation.

Just when I was beginning to cope, I took on the role of technical writer for my employer and had to learn to speak fluent Geek—in a mixture of the abovementioned languages, of course. My favorite “lost in translation” anecdote is about the time I had to explain to a French developer why my loss of an entire morning’s work qualified as a bug in his software; to him, a bug was a calculation error. It took some ingenuity and judicious use of my then-nascent intercultural skills to express the real problem in a way that made sense to him.

In 2002, I traveled China as one member of a delegation specifically setting out to engage in jiao liu, an exchange of ideas (I’ll spare you the complexities of pinyin accents). Having decided at the last possible minute to participate, and now vastly overconfident in my linguistic skills after nearly a decade back in the linguistic melée that is Quebec, I engaged in a crash course to learn enough Chinese to be passably polite to my hosts. I’d reckoned without the difficulty of learning a tonal language after having spent some 40 years as a largely tone-deaf anglophone. It was a delight to watch the smiles of pleasure (or possibly polite and diplomatic amusement) on the faces of my hosts when I greeted them and introduced myself in fluent Chinese—and their outright incomprehension when, having now proven that I was a fluent speaker of Mandarin, I told them that wo bu shuo Zhongwen (”I really don’t speak Chinese—I’m just a very polite trained parrot”). I never did master how to ask for tea: every time I asked for cha, the waitress handed me a fork (also a cha, but with different tonality). Possibly it was just lack of motivation, since I quickly mastered how to request more piejou (beer). I look forward with mingled delight and dread to my proposed trip to India this December; though I hope to become equally polite in Hindi, I fear that I’ll remain entirely incomprehensible in the other 14+ regional Indian languages.

Then there’s that whole embarrassing Martian versus Venusian translation, as explained in John Gray’s “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” After 40 years of practice, I’m still working on it, and hope to someday communicate almost as well as I do in English. There are no guarantees in life, of course, but I have some hope of success. After all, I earn my living as an editor and translator, so evidence notwithstanding, I have some pretensions of skill with words. On the other hand…. Mars? Venus? That whole War of the Worlds thing is awfully intimidating, and I can’t just blame Spielberg.

After 20 years as an editor, I’m convinced that I’m not alone in these problems. If you learn nothing else along the way, editing quickly teaches you how difficult it is to translate concepts that originate in the squishy stuff that lies between an author’s ears into words that will mostly convey the same meaning when transferred into the very different squishy stuff between the reader’s ears. So I figure, on this evidence, we should relax and not worry about internationalization, localization, and translation. It’s clear to me that the real problem is communication per se. Lick that problem and the rest will fall neatly into place. In the meantime, we can reconcile ourselves that information is always and inevitably lost in translation. What counts is the effort we make to minimize that loss.