Program by Day
Program by Track
Program Titles
“Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist?”
24 Ways to Shut Down The Application and Other Apocryphal Stories
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody
Breathing Life into your Technical Documents using Adobe AIR and the Technical Communication Suite
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User
Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World
Extending the Value of Content in Enterprise Systems with Web Content Management
How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book
Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator
Making XML Technology Accessible
Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse
Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain
On the Road to Modular Training Content
Once Content is in XML. Now what?
Putting Everything Back Together Again
See Dynamic Publishing in Action!
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level
The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint
Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA
Understanding Component Content Management
Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management
Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development
What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash
Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information
Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models
[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
[Workshop] An Overview of RoboHelp 7
[Workshop] Content Engineering
[Workshop] DITA Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL
[Workshop] Introduction to XSL
[Workshop] Making DITA Work For Your Data
[Workshop] Simplified Technical English
[Workshop] Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite
Session Details
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level: Kyocera Case Study
Speaker: Ann AdamsTime: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Date: May 8
Track: Localization and Translation
Experience level: Intermediate
Room: Shaughnessy II Room
Kyocera Technology Development produces software for printer drivers and networked device management. The technical communicators are responsible for creating user assistance and system administration manuals. We also edit UI strings and hardware messages and manage translation for 23 languages. Our information assets contain many common elements, but they were difficult to manage without a single-sourcing strategy. Consequently, we created and translated similar or even identical phrases and sentences over the years.
We recognized that if we could manage these assets efficiently that this would dramatically reduce translation costs and free us to create new and richer content that would better support our customers. The foundational strategies that we agreed upon up-front were writing in DITA topics, manging those topics in a content management system, tight integration with a translation tool set and implementing a hosted solution (Software-as-a-Service). To accomplish this, we have implemented an automated end-to-end authoring, reviewing, publishing and translating solution. We looked at every aspect of our group’s output. The result was a radical overhaul of our processes that affected not only the tech comm group, but everyone with whom we interact. Software developers and QA, translation vendors and in-country reviewers and company personnel at our manufacturing facility in Japan can now all connect to our system and work with our data in real-time. The variety of users and the many possibilities the system has opened up is leading us into new territories, as we train and support this varied constituency. This presentation describes how authoring in DITA topics and managing those topics in a content management system has contained translation costs while improving overall information quality.
Since we enjoyed benefit from others’ experience and stories, a recounting of what worked well (and not so well) as we implemented our system can help those who are contemplating a similar move.
