Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
June/July 2007

April 2007 Meeting -- From World-Weary to World-Ready
Presented by Hans Fenstermacher and reviewed by Nancy Rains

Hans Fenstermacher's presentation on writing for global content described how to prepare documentation for global markets by reducing the costs of translation. Hans, the president of ArchiText (Translations.com), recommended an investment in improving the quality of documentation before it is sent to a translation service. This early investment saves considerable cost and time in translation before any problem or weakness in the source is propagated into each translation.

Hans reminded us that information is more often presented in an electronic format, including on-line help or web content, and that is frequently viewed on a wireless device. Readers have less time and patience for large documents than ever before -- whether or not the documents are translated.

Regarding improved document quality, Hans referred to Jakob Nielsen's guidelines for increasing usability:

Reduce volume
Increase scannability
Use neutral objective language (original source Jakob Nielsen, 10/97)

Hans gave us numerous tips on how to address these issues in our documents.

Preparing Your Documentation

Reduce Volume

The biggest benefit in reducing the cost of translation comes from reducing the number of words translated. Consider that translating a word can cost up to 25 cents. On average, translation costs about $45 per page, and you can multiply that cost over the number of pages and the number of translations. Low-value documentation needlessly increases cost. Possibilities for reducing word count include:

Write to the audience requirements -- how well do you know your audience? Can you get real information about your audience so that you can drop information they don't need?
Eliminate the marketing speak -- is a sentence that congratulates the reader for purchasing the product or a successful installation worth its expense in every translation? Do all those instances of the word "easy" serve any purpose?
Eliminate "filler" text -- it can come from anywhere, but common sources are templates and styleguides. For example, does the template require a title for every graphic? These titles might not add much value if the graphic is a screenshot of a GUI feature that has its own title. A sentence such as "This manual is written for beginning through advanced users" might comply with boilerplate for an audience description, but doesn't add much value.
Check for redundancy -- is the same information provided in different chapters of the same book or in different books of the same documentation set? On the micro level, check sentences for phrases such as "troublesome problems."
Evaluate graphics -- graphics, particularly screenshots, usually require extra resources to localize.

Increase Scannability

Make your documents easier to quickly comprehend:

Reduce the number of long, complex sentences to help translators translate better and faster. Like the rest of your audience, translators might find these sentences difficult to comprehend.
Simplify long noun clusters.
Use bulleted lists to break information up into more comprehensible chunks.
Edit for consistency and clarity -- fixing inconsistencies in terminology and style (for example, login, logon, and login ID) makes your document easier for the reader to scan and better for single sourcing. If your translation vendor uses translation memory software, consistent terminology can directly lower costs.

Use Culturally Neutral Language

Removing the marketing speak helps, but also check for jargon and regional bias.

Getting Management Approval

To obtain management approval for the increased resources required for creating the source documentation, Hans suggested demonstrating the savings in initial word count estimates and the reduction in costs for fixing errors in bad translations. If more than a few translations are involved, the initial resource requirements for improving the original documentation can be clearly shown on the ROI (return on investment).