AECMA Simplified English Archives | Shufrans TechDocs Home // AECMA Simplified English Archives | Shufrans TechDocs

Instructor-led training: We offer more than just a training service

1. Are you a manager who has to constantly worry about the varying technical English proficiency levels of your staff?
2. As an engineer, are you facing difficulties explaining your concepts to your technical writing team?
3. In your role as a technical communicator, do you often struggle to convert complex ideas into brilliant content?

If you answered yes to any of the above, join us at the next instructor-led Simplified Technical English training workshop sessions online:

Shufrans’ ILT STE workshop sessions are an effective means of delivering information, as they allow for real-time feedback, questions and answers, manipulation, and changeable delivery to suit the needs of learners in a conducive learning environment. ILT is also the most widely-used method for extended enterprise training, which trains customers and partners, with an 80% usage rate.

STE stands for Simplified Technical English. It offers native & non-native English speakers alike an efficient platform to improve your technical English language competency when writing for a global audience.

1. For technical writers: simplified wording and grammar will improve readability and safety compliance of your documentation and product respectively.
2. For engineers and programmers: Breeze through the writing of test cases, technical documents, and business emails in a highly standardised and regulated manner. STE opens up effective communication channels, hence avoiding potential miscommunication issues at work while improving the overall professional impression that you portray.
3. For translators, translation PMs, and localisation engineers: With STE working for your team in the background, you can streamline your preparation of translation memory/terminology based on leaner documentation, lowered translation & localisation costs, and faster delivery.
4. For LSPs and technical writing services companies: Diversify your business portfolio with an in-depth knowledge of STE as an international controlled English language standard.

Online Simplified Technical English Programme Highlights

1. Highly efficient: We will cover all 382 pages of the ASD-STE100 Specification in two days for immediate implementation.
2. Practicality: cross-industry cases sharing by trainers with excellent pragmatic approach.
3. Follow-up period: 4-month post-training consultation starts immediately after the training to ensure a seamless transition to STE writing at work.
4. Experienced trainer: Ms Shumin Chen, Co-founder & Head of ASD-STE100 training & implementation of Shufrans TechDocs.

Our Training Service Package guarantees the following:

1. Reduces your content development time and efforts
2. Significantly lowers post-processing (e.g. translation) cost
3. One-stop content quality solution
4. Overall quality improvement.

Instructor-led training (ILT) represents 66% of corporate training and development; it reaches 76% in high-performing companies and 80% in high-consequence industries: healthcare industry, pharmaceutical industry, finance, utilities, etc.

**Course fee includes exercises, learning aids, certificate of completion, and 90-day post-training support.

I’ve found all the rules introduced in this workshop equally valuable and applicable in my field of work. The ASD-STE100 Specification is very useful for searching examples and finding STE compliant alternatives. It was also great that we has such a large number of practical exercises. Personally, it would be more valuable to have more context available. This helps us judge how to apply STE optimally. Thank you Shumin! Your workshop was concise, clear, and pragmatic. I also liked the occasional humour! 🙂 Diane Goodrick, Information Architect/ Author Trainer, Schindler Group.

Summary

Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language that is used to write technical manuals in such a way that they can be more easily understood by an international audience. STE helps to make translations cheaper and more accurate. Often a formal requirement for aircraft and defence maintenance documentation, STE can easily be adapted to all technical industries and beyond. Ms. Shumin Chen will teach participants how to correctly and effectively use STE in practice. She will also address some of the mistakes commonly found in technical writing and the frequently incorrect use of common STE writing rules.

Course outline*

• Day 1: Classroom Training
  1. Practical overview of Simplified Technical English
  2. How STE helps both native & non-native speakers of English
  3. Benefits of adopting the STE international writing standard
  4. Writing rules and how to apply them in practice
  5. How to use the general vocabulary.
  6. Approved and non-approved words discussion and the rationale behind.

• Day 2: Application, Review, & Exercises
  1. How to deal with industry-specific terminology
  2. How to use STE for various documentation types
  3. How to implement STE with minimal disruption to on-going production and existing documentation
  4. Practical workshop session for applying STE rules to your own documents
  5. Review, edit, and discuss participants’ own documents to reinforce learning
  6. Classroom presentation of own documents.

* Shufrans also offers customised ASD-STE100 training solutions tailored to meet your specific requirements. These courses are normally provided at the customer’s premises.

Who should attend?

• Compliance managers
• CIO, COO, CTO
• Customer support managers
• Documentation managers
• Editors
• Engineering managers
• Engineers and SMEs who create documentation
• Graphics specialists
• ILS managers
• Maintenance managers
• Operation managers
• Product managers
• Project managers
• Quality managers
• Software research engineers
• Technical illustrators
• Technical writers
• Translation managers
• Translators.

What training outcomes to expect?

Our interactive training, exercises and workshop, will teach participants to standardise content to:

• Author more efficiently
• Communicate more effectively with a global audience
• Improve operational safety
• Reduce AOG / downtime
• Facilitate modular writing and reuse
• Facilitate teamwork
• Facilitate translation
• Maximise consistency
• Optimise product lifecycle support
• Reduce the cost of creating and maintaining technical publications.

I will definitely recommend this training to writers of many fields, especially technical fields. The material, presentation, and instructor are fantastic. I learned a lot about ASD-STE. Even though I’ve been using this writing convention for almost eight years, formal training brought much clarity and comprehension that I had not previously realized. I now know that an aptitude for writing and a copy of the STE rules is a good start, but not enough. This course takes your understanding to a professional level. Lauren Gelli, Senior Technical Writer, Aerotech Inc.

Trainer’s qualifications

Ms. Shumin Chen, principal trainer & consultant at Shufrans TechDocs received her professional on-the-job training in the field of STE under the tutelage of Dr Frans Wijma, a linguist and documentation expert. Together as an experienced global team, they provided their combined knowledge and dedication to benefit customers worldwide. To date, they have provided training and consultancy services to over 180 companies. Shufrans TechDocs is the only company with such vast experience in providing certified STE training.

Shumin has supported various companies with their STE and other documentation needs, based on standards where possible. Although STE was developed for the aerospace industry, more specifically for aircraft maintenance documentation, Shumin 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.

Summary

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled language that is used to write technical manuals in such a way that they can be more easily understood by an international audience. STE helps to make translations cheaper and more accurate. Often a formal requirement for aircraft and defence maintenance documentation, STE can easily be adapted to all technical industries and beyond. Ms. Shumin Chen will teach participants how to correctly and effectively use STE in practice. She will also address some of the mistakes commonly found in technical writing and the frequently incorrect use of common STE writing rules.

All our training materials are updated according to the ASD-STE100 Specification Issue 7, January 2017.

Course outline*

• Practical overview of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
• How STE helps both native & non-native speakers of English
• Writing rules and how to apply them in practice
• How to use the general vocabulary
• How to deal with industry-specific terminology
• How to use STE for various documentation types
• How to implement STE with minimal disruption to on-going production and existing documentation
• Hands-on STE editing and review

* Shufrans also offers customised ASD-STE100 training solutions tailored to meet your specific requirements. These courses are normally provided at the customer’s premises.

“The Simplified Technical English course content and requirements provided by Shumin Chen were an absolute good fit with the TCLoc Master’s program. A technical communicator has to know about the existing specifications for technical documentation. Furthermore, this course helps the students to acquire new skills in order to enhance the accuracy and clarity of contents.” TCLoc Master’s Student, University of Strasbourg.

Who should attend?

• Compliance managers
• CIO, COO, CTO
• Customer support managers
• Documentation managers
• Editors
• Engineering managers
• Engineers and SMEs who create documentation
• Graphics specialists
• ILS managers
• Maintenance managers
• Operation managers
• Product managers
• Project managers
• Quality managers
• Software research engineers
• Technical illustrators
• Technical writers
• Translation managers
• Translators

What training outcomes to expect?

Our interactive training, exercises and workshop, will teach participants to standardise content to:

• Author more efficiently
• Communicate more effectively with a global audience
• Improve operational safety
• Reduce AOG / downtime
• Facilitate modular writing and reuse
• Facilitate teamwork
• Facilitate translation
• Maximise consistency
• Optimise product lifecycle support
• Reduce the cost of creating and maintaining technical publications

Trainer’s qualifications

Ms. Shumin Chen, principal trainer & consultant at Shufrans TechDocs received her professional on-the-job training in the field of STE under the tutelage of Dr Frans Wijma, a linguist and documentation expert. Together as an experienced global team, they provided their combined knowledge and dedication to benefit customers worldwide. To date, they have provided training and consultancy services to over 180 companies. Shufrans TechDocs is the only company with such vast experience in providing certified STE training.

Shumin has supported various companies with their STE and other documentation needs, based on standards where possible. Although STE was developed for the aerospace industry, more specifically for aircraft maintenance documentation, Shumin 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.

In this year’s economic slowdown, training budgets are often the first to shrink, if not, put on hold, as companies try to reduce costs in all areas. Unfortunately, businesses also start to see a direct impact on their level of competitiveness and overall success when they do not continue to invest in employee training.

Thankfully, many quality assurance (QA) managers know about the importance of documentation and the importance of standards to support their documentation.

QA managers recognise that to continue to deliver high quality services and products to their customers, their companies cannot stop investing in competence development to improve their employees’ skills, knowledge and career confidence. Motivated employees suggest a more promising outlook for any business’ future.

Reasons for acquiring Simplified Technical English (STE) writing skills as a professional asset

English happens to be a very rich language, meaning that, amongst other things, it has a huge vocabulary.

English has about three times as many words as French or German. However, in French or German you can say just the same things that you can say in English.

This implies that English has redundant or ambiguous words. Also, English grammar is a problem even for most native English speakers, and it can be highly confusing especially to people who speak English as a second language. Therefore, we want to try and do away with this huge, unnecessary part of the vocabulary, and we want to simplify grammar to what is essential to getting our message across.

Keeping your technical content concise yet precise – the basic principles of STE

1) Only use one word for one function, procedure or object.

2) Use each word in the ASD-STE100 dictionary based on its defined meaning and specific part of speech only.

3)Write only one instruction per sentence.

Most importantly, Simplified English is unique because this is a very balanced, and rather complete set of rules. It was not based on the personal preferences of just one or two people, but a whole committee that has developed this standard.

Working with great partners from all over the world to bring you high quality training workshop events

Organised in collaboration with partners in Holland, Germany, Austria, India and Russia, our global Simplified Technical English (STE) workshops deliver high-quality training content that allows participants to create technical content in STE with great ease and 100% confidence.

Training offers in spring

Our STE training workshops equip technical communication professionals with the skills and confidence to create user-friendly and readable technical documentation, making it easier to translate, or doing away with the need for translations altogether. Refer to our STE training schedule below:

1. Singapore, 3 – 4 March 2016
2. Hyderabad & Bangalore, India, 10 – 15 March 2016
3. Berlin, Germany, 4 – 5 April 2016
4. Tiel, the Netherlands, 21 – 22 April 2016
5. Helsinki, Finland, 9 – 10 May 2016
6. St Petersburg, Russia, 19 – 20 May 2016

For more information on Shufrans’ training courses, please refer to our training page. Shufrans also offers customised ASD-STE100 training solutions that are tailored to meet your specific business requirements. These training workshops are usually conducted on-site at the customer’s premises or at our offices in Singapore.

To register for one of our open STE training classes, call +65 9777 4730 or email register@shufrans-techdocs.com.