Global Talk

The second quarter issue of Carolina Communique, newsletter of the Carolina Chapter, has published “E-Globalization” by Sharmila M. Govindarajan. The article is Sharmila’s final project for completion of the Duke University Continuing Studies in Technical Communication Certificate program.

The Silicon Valley chapter has published “So, What is Linguistic Quality?” by Francoise Spurling of Rubric, in the May, 2007 issue of the Connection newsletter: http://www.stc-siliconvalley.org/newsletter/HTML/articles/spurling-linguistic-quality.htm

Karen Mardahl has sent these links to Chinese and Japanese podcasts available for learning those languages.

http://www.chinesepod.com/ and http://japanesepod101.com/

These were found on a blog by a Chinese to English translator, which may be of interest for other posts too.

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…)