Global Talk

STC ITC SIG localization lead Aki Ito completes his term as chair of GALA on December 31.

The members of the 2007 GALA Board and their positions are:

Chair
Stephen Ryan, Moravia Worldwide

Vice Chair
Kim Harris, text & form

Treasurer
Christiane Bernier, Lionbridge

Secretary
Matthias Caesar, Locatech

Member-at-Large
Arancha Caballero, TSG (Translation Services Glotas)

Aki continues his work as a liaison between STC and GALA.

Please welcome the 55 new members shown as joining the International SIG this month. We wish the 30 members shown as departing well. The International SIG now has 1253 members.

Please welcome the 32 new members who joined the ITC SIG in October; four members departed. The ITC SIG has 1228 members and STC has 15,451 members.

Please renew your membership in STC. The renewal form is posted at https://www.stc.org/duesrenewal/ Dues for SIGs have doubled to $10.00. The International Technical Communication SIG is the professional organization dedicated to international communicaton related to technical and business information. Your leadership team is dedicated to making it an organization of value to you. Please renew and join the leadership team in expanding the activities and services of the ITC SIG.

Please welcome our 43 new members who joined in September. Updated membership counts will be reported when available.

The professional organization for technical communicators in Germany, tekom, recently published a book on the status of technical communication in many countries. The title is Technical communication–international.

ITC SIG manager Kit Brown reviewed the book, and you can read the review on the tekom website. Visit http://www.tekom.de and in the search box, enter “Kit Brown” without the quotes. You can order a copy of the book; the URL for the order form is http://www.tekom.de/upload/alg/Orderingform.pdf

by Kit Brown, Associate Fellow, ITC SIG Manager

This fall I’ll be attending several conferences. I hope to meet as many members as possible at these events and in the areas where the events are being held.

I will be attending Lavacon in Kauai, Hawaii in late September through early October.

I will then be in London for the STC Board meeting and Region 2 Conference the week of October 10, and in Saratoga Springs for ICCC-PCS October 23 to 25, and in Boston just before that.

In November I will be in Weisbaden, Frankfurt, and Karlsruhe, Germany for tekom, and in Warsaw, Poland for LISA.

SIG leaders are meeting by conference call in September to plan the year’s budget and projects, including activities at the annual conference.

More sessions on international topics are planned, and we hope many SIG members have submitted proposals. We will publish advance information about sessions as soon as it’s avaialable early next year.

Please welcome our 22 new members who joined in August. There are 1159 members in the ITC SIG and 15,202 members in STC.

Jeanette Thomas, treasurer of the Instructional Design and Learning SIG, reported on her experience at the STC Annual Conference in the July 2006 IDeaL newsletter.

Jeanette says: “Limiting myself to only four conference sessions a day was difficult, but the easiest one to select was “Cultural and International Perspectives on Adult Learning Activities” by Carolyn Luttrell and others.

“Every year, as our training audiences become more international, it becomes more important to ensure our materials are usable by diverse workforces. I’m passionate about finding new ways to work across cultures, but with so many variations across countries it is difficult to learn about and address every possibility.

“In this session, I expanded my cultural training perspectives to include training dynamics in China, the Middle East, and India. The presenters have been living and training in these regions and brought great insights and examples about how the various learning strategies, such as the Socratic method, would work –- or fail –- in these cultures. They emphasized the role of class and hierarchy in these cultures and the importance of saving face for many learners abroad. An open dialog broadened the discussion to handling conference calls and working with subject matter experts in these regions as well.”

The newsletter of the International Technical Communication SIG of STC is back online, after a hiatus since the end of 2005. Earlier issues are archived on our SIG website. (more…)