Saturday, February 8, 2014

Webinar: A practical overview of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

  • Date: 19-03-2014
  • Location: Online
  • Audience: LSPs and freelancers
  • Price: € 40.00 (ex. 21% VAT)
  • Organised by: 4TA Academy

Description: 
ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language that is used to write technical manuals that can be more easily understood by an international audience. STE helps to make translations cheaper and more accurate. STE can easily be adapted to all technical industries and beyond. Dr. Frans Wijma will discuss how STE works in practice.

Programme:
Dr. Frans Wijma from Shufra Ltd. will provide the audience with a practical introduction of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE).
Frans will explain the situation that caused major aerospace manufacturers to work together in order to develop a standardised, controlled form of English to be used for aircraft maintenance documentation. Frans will discuss how the vocabulary and syntax were restricted while making sure that the remaining vocabulary and syntax would be sufficiently versatile to write meaningful documents about complex equipment.
Given the success of STE and its adaptability, it was over time applied to various document types, and increasingly also in other (mainly technical) industries. Where in the aerospace and defence industries, safety and readability are the main considerations for the use of STE, in many other industries the main consideration is to save on translation cost without compromising on translation quality.
Frans will detail the essential steps of an STE implementation and discuss how STE can be gradually introduced without disrupting on-going production or affecting existing documentation.
Frans will share the feedback received from many companies and individual participants and tell about his experiences with some initial resistance, criticism of some of the rules and the gradual “conversion” to becoming true STE practitioners. Frans will also tell about the different ways in which STE helps technical writers with English as their native language as well as those for whom English is a second language.
Frans will be happy to take and answer your questions towards the end of the webinar or any time thereafter.

Speaker profile:  
Dr. Frans Wijma, CEO and senior trainer & consultant at Shufra Ltd., has a background in electrical engineering and linguistics. He worked as a technical translator and multilingual technical writer before he became involved with large aerospace documentation projects and thus with STE around 15 years ago.
Frans has supported various aerospace companies with their STE and other documentation needs, based on standards where possible. Customers included Boeing, Eurocopter, EADS, Rolls-Royce, Embraer, TAI, Beriev and SAAB. 
Although STE was developed for the aerospace industry, more specifically for aircraft maintenance documentation, Frans found that it made a lot of sense to apply the same principles to other industries and types of documents as well. Few if any changes to the specification are necessary to adapt STE to industries ranging from machinery to IT, automotive to medical equipment.
Meanwhile, Frans provided training to people from more than 160 companies worldwide, mostly on-site with the customer. Non-aerospace customers include Kubota, Rheinmetall, Samsung, Tetra Pak and Volkswagen.

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: