Shufra invites you to a 2-day ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English training in Helsinki, Finland

Join this professional training opportunity to learn about international documentation standards and achieve:

• Cost savings
• Reduced translation cost
• Professional improvement
• Quality assurance
• Compliance
• Competitive advantage
• Shorter time-to-market and downtime

Shufra's training has been fully updated to support the latest version of the specification - Issue 6, January 2013.

Topics

Simplified Technical English will greatly improve the quality of your documentation and help you achieve considerable time and cost savings. This standard regulates the language used in technical publications, making text easier to understand, less ambiguous and more consistent. STE greatly improves translation quality and provides a perfect basis for multilingual translation, saving cost while achieving optimum quality.
See our case study to learn more about the cost savings associated with Simplified Technical English.

When

The STE course will be held on 24 and 25 April 2013, from 9.00 till 16.00 h.

Where

Helsinki, Finland

Who we are

Shufra is an international consultancy firm. It was founded by seasoned industry experts who work according to international standards and have extensive experience in many industries, including aerospace, defense, electronics, machinery, medical equipment, banking and telecommunications.
Please contact us for more information or to register.

This site is no longer maintained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:

http://www.shufrans-techdocs.com/upcoming-ste-training-locations/

How is STE different from company style guides?

Company style guides often include:

·         Writing rules

·         Company-specific terminology

·         Rules on formatting

STE includes:

·         66 writing rules

·         Guidelines on company-specific terminology (nouns and adjectives known as “Technical Names”)

·         General vocabulary (approx. 900 approved words as well a large number of commonly used words that are not approved in STE)

The main difference between STE and the average corporate style guide thus is the addition of general vocabulary, while providing for flexibility regarding company- and industry-specific terminology – a very powerful concept that greatly facilitates adaptation to a company’s specific requirements.

As STE was developed by people from different companies (including for example Boeing and Airbus), countries (USA, Canada, various European countries) and professional background (writers, linguists and engineers), the rule set and vocabulary are rather well-balanced rather than to reflect the views of a single person or company. Moreover, the rules and vocabulary were validated against actual content from relevant manuals.

Since development of the specification started some 30 years ago, it has seen regular updates, in part based on change requests from users in the field. The current release is Issue 6, released in January 2013. The specification is maintained by ASD (formerly AECMA), the AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe.

About the author 

Dr. Frans Wijma has a background in electrical engineering and linguistics.

He has been working as a consultant with customers in various industries worldwide and is widely regarded as the leading expert in Simplified Technical English, aviation documentation and multilingual documentation, providing training and consultancy services to customers worldwide. In addition, he is a regular speaker at language and industry events, fluent in 10 languages and a commercial pilot.

Over the years, Frans Wijma was responsible for the development and implementation of STE checker tools for compliance with ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (Simplified Technical English, formerly AECMA Simplified English). He has also worked with the checker tools MAXit (Smart Communications), BSEC (Boeing Simplified English Checker) and acrolinx IQ.

Frans Wijma was the project manager for many translation and development programs for customers worldwide, including Boeing, Embraer, Black & Decker, Rolls-Royce and Fuji Heavy Industries.

In 2001, Frans Wijma was presented with the prestigious Pride @ Boeing award in recognition of exceptional performance in supporting the development of the multilingual Longbow Apache IETM for Korea.

Copyright © 2013 Shufra, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Please refer all pertinent questions to Shufra Consultancy.

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:

www.shufrans-techdocs.com/upcoming-ste-training-locations/

Certified ASD-STE100 training classes in January 2013

Registration is open!

Ankara, Turkey

Istanbul, Turkey

Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil

Jakarta, Indonesia

Helsinki, Finland

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:

http://www.shufrans-techdocs.com/upcoming-ste-training-locations/

STE in a nutshell

Source: The Finnish Technical Communications Society December 2012 Issue

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language standard that helps to improve readability and translatability of technical documentation. STE originates from the aerospace and defence industry and is a requirement for many aerospace and defence projects. Increasingly, companies in other technical industries, such as automotive, machinery, electronics, telecommunications and medical equipment, adopt STE to reduce translation cost and improve translation quality.

Download full article here

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:

http://www.shufrans-techdocs.com/upcoming-ste-training-locations/

Standardisation as a cost reduction strategy

Why standardise?

Standardisation is widely practised in manufacturing to realise economy of scale at the product level. Why not apply standardisation to documentation?

Data standardisation is cost saving by common sense. Injuries, losses and costly legal liabilities can occur as a result of unclear documentation and ambiguous translations. Just like the manufacturing industry makes use of standard components in their product assembly line, Simplified Technical English uses standard vocabulary in the ASD-STE100 specification and consistent industry-/product specific terminology to create documentation. 

The borrowed concept of standardisation in the engineering world when translated into the technical documentation industry is based on standardised terminology and simple grammar rules. The latter for instance, promotes the use of the active voice and simple present tense to clearly identify the doer of a particular action so as to avoid miscommunication and ambiguous translations during the localisation process. In a nutshell, we can draw a parallel between grammar rules and SOPs that both share a common purpose in streamlining processes in a straightforward and objective manner.

How does Simplified Technical English differ from Standard English and how do I know if this is right for my industry?

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is an international standard that helps to make technical documentation easy to understand. Simplified Technical English standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting users control their specific terminology. Although Simplified Technical English originates from the aerospace and defence industries, it can easily be customised and applied to any other industry, including machinery, automotive, electronics, IT and medical equipment. Major manufacturers and the S1000D standard require the use of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

Case studies available for reference

Our customer is a manufacturer of mobile X-ray based imaging solutions. They created an operator manual and a service manual in Standard English. This manual is to be translated into 7 other languages.

Before using Simplified English, the manuals had a total word count of 67,300 words. The number of pages was 454. In Simplified English, the word count came down to 49,600 words. The page count was reduced to 406.

Standard English cost calculation (in EUR)*

	Word count	Word rate	Target languages	Cost
No match	59,315	0.14	7	58,128.70
Repetition	7,985	0.04	7	2,235.80
Total	67,300			60,364.50

Simplified English cost calculation (in EUR)*

	Word count	Word rate	Target languages	Cost
No match	36,515	0.14	7	35,784.70
Repetition	13,085	0.04	7	3,663.80
Total	49,600			39,448.50

The company thus saves almost EUR 21,000 or 35% on the translation of these manuals. For subsequent manuals, the savings would increase further thanks to better re-use and yield from translation memory.

Text in Simplified Technical English is easier to understand and may not even require translation. Where translation is needed, Simplified Technical English helps to drastically reduce translation cost and time-to-market, as it effectively eliminates redundant words and improves consistency.

With the ever increasing number of languages that companies need to deal with, these savings add up quickly. As content in Simplified Technical English is easier to validate, technical writers will be more productive, and fewer iterations and less rework will be required.

For this reason, the time-to-market is reduced by a similar percentage.

See our site www.shufra-consultancy.com for more information.

Editorial note: Based on feedback from readers, we would like to clarify that the cost reduction above is based on statistics from standard commercial memory tools, i.e. re-use on the sentence (segment level). This is brought by a combination of consistent style, vocabulary and terminology.