Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter August/September 2008

July 2008 Meeting -- Global Content Development: Best Practices and Case Studies
Presented by Tim Bombosch and reviewed by Monique Semp

At the July 2008 meeting of the San Francisco STC, Tim Bombosch discussed a variety of topics around the concept of "global content":

• What is Global Content?
• Why Should Tech Writers Care?
• Lessons From Case Studies
• Tips for Writing Global Content

What is Global Content?

Although we probably assume that writing global content means writing for translation and localization, Tim explained that even when we're writing English prose that we know will not be translated, we should think globally. That is, our English docs will likely be read by non-native English speakers, the products that we document are bound to be used world-wide, and writing globalized content makes our docs easier to use, maintain, and scale.

So on a practical level, what does all this mean? To paraphrase John R. Kohl's The Global English Style Guide, global English means:

• Writing so that things sound natural to native speakers
• Eliminating ambiguity
• Eliminating unfamiliar terms and phrases
• Standardizing and simplifying the language

All of this can lead to new ways of thinking about our writing. Once we educate people such as product managers that our documents are part of the product, not just something to be checked off on a requirements list, we can approach our writing from more of a product and content design viewpoint.

Why Should Tech Writers Care?

So now we know what global content is, but why should we as tech writers care? How is this different from just writing "good docs"? Well, it's important for many reasons:

• It's a great specialization that expands your job prospects.
• Documents are a key sales differentiator for our clients' and employers' products.
• The cost of localization is very high, and our work can dramatically lower those costs.
• Writing global content leads to treating the documentation as a product development process, which in turn can greatly improve quality and decrease cost.

Lessons From Case Studies

To illustrate his previous points, Tim presented personal case studies and examples from John R. Kohl's The Global English Style Guide. Key findings included:

• Reducing word counts by 25% completely paid for the information architecture costs of a complex document set by dramatically lowering the translation costs.
• A late in the process change to a single sentence cost $1,200 to translate.
• You should expect linguistic QA costs to be 25%-30% of the total translation costs.
• Machine translation, which is significantly less expensive than human-powered localization, but which historically has produced low-quality results, can be dramatically improved by providing globalized English as input.
• Translation costs can be a real and significant barrier to entering foreign markets; this was overcome for one medical device manufacturer by redesigning their documents so that they were able to be localized.

Tips for Writing Global Content

Moving out of the theoretical realm, Tim provided some concrete tips for writing and managing the production of global content:

• From John R. Kohl's Top 10 English Guidelines: use short, complete sentences, untangle long noun phrases, avoid gerunds and use simple verb forms, use "that" liberally, and most importantly, strive to make your sentences precise and unambiguous.
• Limit the vocabulary, and consider using Controlled English software.
• Edit and then edit again.
• Use templates to standardize writing and formatting.
• Apply best practices for project management.
• Allow your tools and processes to support your documentation goals.

Writing global content can be challenging, but the rewards to your users, your employers/clients, and your own career make the efforts worth while.

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