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/

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:

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

Information Mapping®, ASD-STE100 and a Master Class on Lake Garda!

Introduction

Writec and Shufra are delighted to offer you a comprehensive training programme to help you communicate more effectively, improving the structure, presentation and wording of your documents for optimum readability and accessibility while achieving substantial cost savings, especially for documents that are translated into multiple languages.

 

Information Mapping®

The Information Mapping® method is a proven, research-based approach to analyzing, organizing, and presenting information based on the audience’s needs and the purpose of the information. It improves organizational efficiency by making it easy for employees to quickly find, understand and use the information they need to do their jobs effectively. Learned and used by more than 600.000 people from thousands of the world’s leading organizations and governments in more than 25 countries, Information Mapping® offers these advantages:

• authoring, maintenance and translation cost reduction
• staff training time reduction
• employee knowledge captured
• standard and compliant documentation
• safety & operational procedures improved
• CMS “content ready” topics

Instructor: Vilma Zamboli, Writec
Language of instruction: Italian

 

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English is an international standard that regulates the language used in technical manuals. Compliance with ASD-STE100 improves readability and translatability of technical documentation in all any industry, thus supporting the safe and efficient operation of equipment. It combines quality assurance with substantial cost savings for multilingual publications.
Instructor: Dr. Frans Wijma, Shufra LLC
Language of instruction: English. Interpretation from and into Italian is available as necessary, and many of the principles learned also apply to writing in Italian.

 

Master Class

For those who sign up for both classes, we offer an exclusive, complimentary half-day workshop where we combine all the knowledge accumulated over the previous 4 days with the joint insight of all participants and teachers, to rewrite and review any document brought in by participants. We will jointly apply IM and STE as well as general good writing practices.

 

Your teachers

 

Vilma Zamboli

Information Mapping™ and Madcap Flare Certified instructor, winner of two Trans European Technical Communication Competition Merit Awards, Vilma Zamboli jumped into Technical Communication in 1999 after 15 years of software analysis and development in automation and process control. CEO of Writec, Information Mapping™ Solution Partner - a documentation company based on Lake Garda, she trained 12 companies in methods, tools and processes related to Technical Communication and Technical Writing. Writec provides services in online and printed technical documentation.

 

Dr. Frans Wijma

Dr. Frans Wijma, owner of Shufra LLC, is widely regarded as the leading expert in Simplified Technical English, aviation documentation and multilingual documentation. He has given ASD-STE100 training to over 145 companies worldwide, in industries ranging from aerospace and defence to healthcare and IT.

 

Schedule

18 and 19 February 2013: Information Mapping
20 and 21 February 2013: ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
22 February 2013: Master Class

 

References

Vilma Zamboli has trained participants from a wide range of companies, including ABB Sace, Same Deutz-Fahr, Siemens, Sistemi, SSI Space Software Italia and Tetra Pak.
Dr. Frans Wijma has trained participants from a range of industries, including Tetra Pak, Volkswagen, ABB, Samsung, Kubota, Honeywell, Boeing and Eurocopter.

 

Where

Desenzano del Garda (BS), Italy

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/

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.  

Tetra Pak saves translation cost

Tetra Pak is the world's leading food processing and packaging solutions company. Tetra Pak chose Shufra to provide ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) training to their team of technical writers, who create a wide range of operator and service manuals that are translated into 26 languages. As STE reduces the word count of the English source by at least 20%, the potential for cost savings is very significant, while improving quality at the same time.

Technical Publication Manager, Mr Marco Panari shared his thoughts on the 2-day ASD-STE100 class: "The training provided by Frans on STE was excellent. He has a very deep knowledge of the subject and all the people at the end of the course has recognised that this 2 days course were really worth. Top Qualities: Expert, Good Value, High Integrity."

Hear more from our satisfied customers.