Products and processes are becoming more complex, while companies worldwide increasingly have to deal with different languages.

Although technical documentation is predominantly written in English, it can often be difficult to understand due to its complexity: complex sentence structures, multiple meanings and synonyms easily result in confusion. In addition, many readers’ command of English can fall below the level of those who created the documentation, which especially applies to non-native English speakers.

In addition, for documentation that has to be translated into other languages, one cannot expect the translation to be of great quality if the source file was ambiguous to begin with.

As a result, these are often the consequences:

• Confused and frustrated readers
• Safety risk
• Damage during operation or maintenance
• Liability claims
• High localization costs
• Unsatisfactory translations
• Higher training support costs
• Ineffective customer service
• Unanticipated costs as a result of miscommunication

In this context, clear and effective writing has become more important than ever before.

Simplified Technical English (also known as Controlled English) is a method of writing that makes technical English easy to understand. The use of Simplified Technical English stimulates (global) acceptance of technical documentation as it improves readability and prevents misunderstandings and misinterpretations.



Benefits of Simplified Technical English

• Standardization of technical writing
• Quality assurance for technical documentation
• Efficient authoring and editing
• Reduction of errors, misunderstandings and safety risks
• Reduced time to market
• Easier to reuse, translate and maintain
• Cost savings due to reduced risk of safety, damage and liability claims
• Lower product lifecycle cost
• Content management: Simplified Technical English facilitates CMS through optimum reusability of content that is clear and concise

How controlled authoring facilitates XML and translations


As today’s authoring environment is changing to structured XML and content management, it would only make sense to also adapt controlled terminology and good writing practice rules to further improve reusability and create additional cost savings.

Doing so will not only standardize the content, it will standardize content management in general, create efficiency, and further increase the many benefits content management already offers. Reusability is the key word here, which applies both to the English content, as well as to the translations, which can decrease the content up to 30% AND save translation cost up to 40% per language! Cheaper translations are one aspect, but avoiding costs as a result of clear and unambiguous communication to our customers can be tremendous, let alone the fact that our customers simply understand what they are reading, which will be a further enhancement to your product.

Simplified Technical English is a long-term and comprehensive initiative designed to standardize the way technical publications are written. It facilitates globalization in a reliable, cost-effective and efficient way.

In addition to bringing clarity and consistency to technical documentation, STE can save you up to 30% in translation cost. Furthermore, STE facilitates industry standards like DITA, S1000D, and SCORM, but also XML and CMS through optimum reusability.

If you are opting to go towards any of these standards, if you have a translation requirement, or in case you are only looking to create clearer and understandable technical documentation, Simplified Technical English is the standard to take into serious consideration.

Berry Braster will explain the principles of STE and its benefits, and will give you practical and real-life examples in the form of case studies.

With two releases of RoboHelp in 2007, Adobe is working to restore its place in the help authoring world after several uncertain years. If you’’re a RoboHelp X5 user who’s been waiting to see where RoboHelp was going, come to this workshop. Version 7 offers the most significant interface changes in years, and some significant new features. Plus you can use it with Captivate and Acrobat to build multi-modal help. This workshop offers a hands-on overview where you’’ll use RoboHelp 7 to create a simple help system and look at its integration with the rest of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite.

Content engineering is the application of a rigorous discipline to the task of understanding content and designing applications that can help people create, manage, share, publish and use that content. Content engineering defines a relationship between content management and the content processing services that content management depends upon. The framework further provides a content processing roadmap that lays out, in a useful way, the array of different content processing services that modern solutions require. These services include content conversion at the early stage in the content lifecycle as well as the publishing of information products that have been tailored to fit specific needs.

Other services include refactoring, the decomposition of content into modular components, and normalization, the elimination of redundancy to optimize content for long-term maintenance and reuse. Also included are services that extract and augment the metadata resources that help to determine when a unit of content is to be incorporated into a product and how it should be presented.

The establishment and management of relationships within and across content modules is yet another aspect of content processing and one that is receiving ever increasing attention.

Finally, a number of specialized processing services support the publishing service and these ensure that content that has been fully optimized and enriched can be efficiently resolved and compiled to produce information products of startling quality and timeliness. The kernel of content processing services is then, within the larger framework of content engineering, tied to overall design principles that govern the construction and maintenance of scalable and portable solutions. The final considerations within content engineering then connect these more technical factors to criteria that ultimately determine business benefits whether these are evaluated on an enterprise level or on the more practical level of projects seeking to achieve specific improvements.

This workshop will provide attendees with a working understanding of content engineering, the content processing roadmap, and how these techniques can be leveraged to deliver persistent business benefits. This workshop will be valuable for anyone involved with an initiative to implement content management or modernized publishing capabilities.

This session is intended for those with help, web, and print delivery requirements. Adobe FrameMaker users or those looking to extend their help authoring capability by migrating to a FrameMaker-centric workflow will benefit most. We’ll use an existing documentation project to show development from cocktail napkin to full-featured output.

The output from a single FrameMaker book file will include:

• Free tips & tricks on the web
• Commercially available Flash demos
• Self-paced study materials
• Courseware
• Reference books

We’ll finish with a discussion of options for self-correcting systems to keep the material up-to-date.

Applications used in demo:

• Adobe FrameMaker 8
• Adobe Robohelp 7
• Adobe Captivate 3
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Adobe Illustrator CS3
• Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro
• Adobe Dreamweaver
• Adobe Contribute

Concepts addressed:

• Setting up content models
• Establishing style sheets
• Electronic referencing
• Conditional text
• Complex numbering
• Weblinks for print v. electronic formats
• Creating Robohelp import template
• Updating Robohelp project and output from Frame materials
• Using native Photoshop files
• Using native Illustrator files
• Placing video in FrameMaker 8 for print output v. electronic output
• Creating multiple outputs from Robohelp
• Using Dreamweaver and Contribute to update source content remotely