By Pat Moell, co-manager, Technical Editing SIG

I enjoyed meeting so many of you at the STC Conference in Minneapolis in May. We have such an enthusiastic group of editors in the Technical Editing SIG. Thanks to all of you who helped make our SIG presence at the conference a success, and thanks to those of you who signed up for volunteer duties beyond the conference.

I noticed several trends at the conference, a couple of them seemingly in contradiction with each other. One trend is that we have become a Google-centric global community in which quality is determined by the relevance and timeliness of the information rather than by the quality of the writing. In our wiki environment where many can contribute to the content, misspelled words and poor grammar are more easily tolerated as long as the information is accurate and meets the user’s immediate needs.

Almost directly opposite of that trend and meeting a different need is the trend toward tightly controlled English, toward defined terms that each have one meaning. The push for this controlled English is the cost of translation. As more companies become global, they take seriously the need to reduce the proliferation of words in a document. One speaker said that we really only need to use about 500 words in our vocabulary to get most points across. He predicted intriguingly that if we used these 500 words consistently, eventually we would not need to do translations. The world would learn these 500 English words, and we’d have them in common as a global community.

Another trend is the convergence of authoring and translation. The May 2007 issue of Intercom has an article on this subject: “Closing the Content Gap: Converging Authoring and Translation.” There were several presentations at the conference on ways of unifying the authoring, editing, and deployment of multilingual content. Pierre Cadieux had a stimulating presentation with graphics that showed the workflow of an integrated authoring and translation system. Such visuals can help organizations determine where their own multilingual processes and content management systems are lacking.

Related to this trend is the trend toward globalizing graphics. HP, for example, has worked hard in this area to make sure that its graphics are understood everywhere and are not offensive anywhere. Sometimes, it’s true, a picture is worth a thousand words and can save a lot in translation costs. At other times, unless the graphic is going to serve a useful, nonredundant purpose, words are better. Show the task and not the object.

Yet another trend is the technical communicator’s increasing involvement in helping create user interfaces instead of just describing them. User assistance and user interfaces are converging. One goal is to reduce the need for documentation.

I felt that the quality of presentations was very high this year. Every session that I attended was worthwhile and informative. And our Technical Editing progression was also enlightening. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the editor as information architect.

See you in Philadelphia next year!