Sunday, July 28, 2013

Because the best product is only as good as its documentation – streamlining your documentation processes with a practical content strategy

Case study

Our customer, the Finn-Power Group, established in 1969, is a multinational group of companies specialising in sheet metal working technology with 2 manufacturing sites in Italy, 1 in the US and 1 in Finland. 

Industry concerns

Safety starts with quality. The best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data made available to the customer. Customer documentation is a vital and integral part of Finn-Power’s comprehensive range of machinery. Most crucially, the documentation needs to do its part to ensure the safe and correct use of the product by providing complete, accurate and effective information.

Additionally, with the EU machinery directive in place and the EU now comprising of 28 countries, there is a regulatory need for clear and accurate translation into many different languages as well as specific, safety-related content

Using Simplified Technical English ASD-STE100 to create user content 

To make content easier to understand as well as faster and cheaper to translate, Dr Frans Wijma gave training to Finn-Power’s team of technical translators, writers and documentation manager in the rules and practical application of this international standard. Course participants did a complete rewrite of selected sample documents in Simplified Technical English. 

Finn-Power has successfully implemented ASD-STE100 since 2010 with the continuous support from the team at Shufra.

ASD-STE100 standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting companies control their specific terminology (Technical Names). The ASD-STE100 standard is widely used in industries ranging from aerospace to IT, consumer electronics, automotive and machinery

The next step – formulating/designing a useful information structure

Taking on the other important aspect of documentation is the structural reuse of content and optimizing technical means for reuse. With all their business requirements in mind, Finn-Power was looking for a highly intuitive, low-threshold content management solution (CMS).

We tapped into our partner network and found Author-it to be the perfect fit with the customer’s requirements as it includes a translation management module that allows users to efficiently and effectively manage multilingual content. Author-it allows you to reuse content with a high level of granularity. While most CMS systems just let you reuse whole blocks of text, Author-it allows for text reuse on the sentence level, doing away with the need to define portions of text intended for reuse.

Said Ms Hanna Korpinen, Manager of R&D and Documentation: ”Now that we have also taken on this other important aspect of documentation, we are better positioned to provide quality documentation to our customers on-time and within budget!


This site is no longer maintained

You may be interested in the following links:
www.shufrans-techdocs.com for all technical documentation and publication needs.
www.asd-ste100.net for Simplified Technical English expertise.

www.asd-ste100.solutions for Simplified Technical English training & consultancy services.

International training workshops can be found here:

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Simplified Technical English training at HansemEUG

Dr Frans Wijma, a well-known authority in the field of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, was invited to speak and provide training services at Hansem EUG Inc, a leading provider of content and user manual development services in Korea. 

During this three-day Simplified Technical English (STE) training session and workshop, Dr Wijma introduced STE writing rules to course participants through a series of engaging and interactive writing and rewriting exercises. Course participants were given the opportunity to examine and thoroughly consider selected parts of technical documentation. This was followed by a complete rewrite of sample documents in Simplified Technical English, where participants were able to explore the benefits and ROI of using the STE writing standard.

Feedback from our course participants includes the following: “I was at first skeptical of the advantages that STE will bring as it seemed to have mainly been used in the aerospace & defence industry. This intensive three-day training course has changed my opinion and certainly helped to sharpen my technical writing skills tremendously!” “This workshop has equipped me with the right kind of STE knowledge and skill sets to move forward confidently in my role as a technical writing team leader. I am glad that I was able to attend this course!” “With our training in STE by Shufra, we can achieve faster, better and cheaper translations.

This site is no longer maintained

You may be interested in the following links:
www.shufrans-techdocs.com for all technical documentation and publication needs.
www.asd-ste100.net for Simplified Technical English expertise.
www.asd-ste100.solutions for Simplified Technical English training & consultancy services.

International training workshops can be found here: