Shufra Consultancy: machinery

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:

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

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!”