Global Talk

Galaxy, the quarterly GALA newsletter, has three feature articles on maturity levels in localization, in the fourth quarter 2006 issue: http://www.gala-global.org/newsletters/newsletter_5927.html

California State University, Chico Continuing Education, Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), and The Localization Institute
2007 Localization Certification Program. Forty-five hours of self-paced, online instruction; a three-day intensive workshop; and a localization certification exam. 

 Two workshops for 2007: European Localization Certification Program, April 25-27, 2007, Marseille, France and North American Localization Certification, June 12-14, 2007, California State University, Chico, USA. The Chico site will also host Advanced Training in Localization Project Management June 15-16, 2007.

To enroll or learn more, please visit http://rce.csuchico.edu/localize or call CSU, Chico Continuing Education at +1-530-898-6105.

Seth Gottlieb has proposed levels of website localization:
http://contenthere.blogspot.com/2006/11/levels-of-localization.html

What would you add or take away?

Bob Doyle has announced his new site, http://www.cms-global.org, a resource on globalization and content management. By means of filtered RSS feeds from CMS-News.org, it aggregates bloggers in the globalization field, including John Yunker, Don DePalma, and Multilingual magazine’s Blogos.

The site has glossaries of terms for globalization, localization, and machine translation, as well as links to bilingual glossaries in specialized fields. It also lists professional organizations worldwide.

The home page has been localized into a few languages. For example, the site serves Spanish to a browser set to Spanish. Bob hopes to do more languages (especially right-to-left languages and Asian double-byte languages) in the future.

The CM Pros Globalization Community will be working with the website committee to localize the CM Pros website navigation into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, right-to-left Hebrew, and double-byte Japanese.

Bob’s EContent column of October 3, 2006 is “Localizing Your Content.”

In April 2005, the TecDoc Net Report estimated the number of potential jobs in the technical communications field in Europe at 227,000. The complete report is available from:
http://www.tceurope.org/tecdocnet/tecdocnet_index.htm
(http://www.tceurope.org/pdf/tecdoc.pdf).

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 Michael Whitman, Senior Member Northern New England chapter and ITC SIG

Translation should no longer be an afterthought… ever. Companies gain a competitive advantage when all writers employ a clear, simple, “global” style of English.

As manager of translation projects, I used to spend a lot of time “editing for translation” instruction manuals and marketing brochures whose English had been created without sensitivity for the needs of the translation process.

After I began working “upstream” with document writers, teaching what was difficult for our translators in our English documents, I needed to edit less and less.

In any company, however, there are always new folks who need to learn, so I have developed two pages of the most frequently needed changes. Often writers only need be made aware of these points, to improve their text so it is more “world-ready.”

These suggestions may also be helpful for some newer technical writers, since clear, unambiguous text serves well as a communication medium, whether or not it will be translated.

Here are the tips I developed: (more…)

By Susan Ng, Senior Member Long Island Chapter and ITC SIG

Susan provided this summary of a discussion on the ITC SIG email list on August 8. 2006. It is published here by permission of the author.

In close to 15 responses, the overwhelming majority of list members suggested having the translations done in Universal Spanish, that is, a form of Latin American Spanish that has been genericized to accommodate the variations in the language spoken in that part of the world. (more…)

TCeurope has published “Professional education and training of Technical Communicators in Europe.”

The publication includes sections on the state of the field and competencies of technical writers. The publication is available for download.

Technical writers in Israel have a thriving online community at http://www.elephant.org.il.

There is a weekly column called “Life as a Tech Writer” at that provides a humorous, but sadly true, look at technical writing. There is a column on “The Why of Style” and a proposed Code of Ethics for Tech Writers, along with articles on living in working in Israel in the face of recent hostilities.