I just finished reading an article in the February 2012 issue of Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication. The article was written by Jack Molisani and Scott Abel, and is entitled, “Tech Comm 2.0: Reinventing Our Relevance in the 2000s.” The authors use the common structure of a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, [...]
Last week, I commented on Kare Anderson’s post in the Harvard Business Review about Crafting an Attention-Grabbing Message. In her post, Kare makes many valid points about how to create messages that are truly memorable. Kare lists three different techniques that you can use to craft that attention grabber: Use familiar slogans in a fresh new way [...]
Simple English Comes to Wikipedia for Translators Without Borders I know, here I am writing about Translators Without Borders again. I can’t help it. They are doing such important work in the world. As a content-development firm that has been around for 17+ years, we have been impacted by the global recession like many of [...]
Recently, my friend and colleague, Jennifer Beaupre Glynn, wrote an interesting article on four things that you can do to make your content “king.” They are: Make your content easy to understand. Put some effort into it. Be proactive. Market your content. I definitely agree that making sure your content is easy to understand is a critical [...]
Back in the day, when a startup was going to ship a product, they would hire a writer (or a team) to create a suite of documentation. They’d hire a marcom person to create datasheets and whitepapers. They’d hire someone to create a website. Most of the time, the people they hired were specially trained [...]
Silos. Everyone talks about them. Disparate groups of people in the same company, working on the same content, with absolutely no knowledge of each other. For example, technical documentation and localization. Or, marcom and localization. Or, technical support knowledge-base writers and localization. Pretty much any group creating content is a separate silo from the group [...]
Time to market. Those three little words can make the difference between getting ahead of your competition and being just another maker of a smartphone (or whatever product or service your company sells). As product managers and marketeers will tell you, time to market is one of the crucial aspects of a product launch. Nowadays, [...]
I have said this so many times before: When it comes to localization, keep your content short and sweet. Mainly short. The sweet part is up to you. Why? Because flabby content is expensive to translate. Let’s review the way you pay for translation. Translation companies charged by the word/by the language. For example, you [...]
It’s been a few years now that I’ve been dabbling in the wild and wacky world of localization. I really like the people I’ve met. Most are smart and passionate about what they do. They care deeply about accuracy, readability, and quality. They care about translation costs and keeping them as reasonable as possible. And [...]
Once you have thought about how you are going to organize your content, it is time to turn your attention to creating the content. As I mentioned in my post Your Brain on XML, knowing, in advance, if you are going to be reusing content as part of your ecosystem really helps dictate the way [...]
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