ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English Archives | Page 2 of 2

April 2016

Attend a 2-day hands-on Simplified Technical English editing & review workshop in Vienna, Austria

by Shufrans Techdocs in News & Events Comments Off

Quick facts

Dates: 19 – 20 September 2016

Location: Vienna, Austria

Length of training: 2 days

Early bird registration: Before 25 August 2016

Sign up early to enjoy a 20% training discount

Deadline for registration: 9 September 2016

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.

ASD-STE100 is mandated by several commercial and military specifications (MIL-SPEC) that control the style and content of maintenance documentation. Military defence standards (MIL-SPEC / MIL-STD) such as MIL-STD-3048, as well as technical documentation standards like S1000D and ATA iSpec 2200 recommend the use of ASD-STE100.

Often a formal requirement for aircraft and defence maintenance documentation, STE can easily be adapted to all technical industries and beyond.

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.

“STE is a ‘way of life’ in the field of technical writing and documentation. The ASD-STE100 exercises covered a wide spectrum of topics from choosing between approved and non-approved words to recreating documentation in STE. Shumin expertly guides us from classroom learning mode to real-life practical application of STE rules. The materials that she presented were informative and very convincing.” Martin Broekhuis, Technical Editor, Webasto.

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?

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.

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.

Request for the full course description

July 2013

Streamlining your documentation processes with a practical content strategy

by Shufrans Techdocs in Blog Comments Off

Safety starts with quality. The best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data made available to the customer.

Case study

Our customer, the Finn-Power Group, established in 1969, is a multinational group of companies specialising in sheet metal working technology with 2 manufacturing sites in Italy, 1 in the US and 1 in Finland.

Industry concerns

Customer documentation is a vital and integral part of Finn-Power’s comprehensive range of machinery. Most crucially, the documentation needs to do its part to ensure the safe and correct use of the product by providing complete, accurate and effective information.

Additionally, with the EU machinery directive in place and the EU now comprising of 28 countries, there is a regulatory need for clear and accurate translation into many different languages as well as specific, safety-related content.

Using Simplified Technical English ASD-STE100 to create user content

To make content easier to understand as well as faster and cheaper to translate, Dr Frans Wijma gave training to Finn-Power’s team of technical translators, writers and documentation manager in the rules and practical application of this international standard. Course participants did a complete rewrite of selected sample documents in Simplified Technical English.

Finn-Power has successfully implemented ASD-STE100 since 2010 with the continuous support from the team at Shufra.

ASD-STE100 standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting companies control their specific terminology (Technical Names). The ASD-STE100 standard is widely used in industries ranging from aerospace to IT, consumer electronics, automotive and machinery.

The next step – formulating/designing a useful information structure

Taking on the other important aspect of documentation is the structural reuse of content and optimizing technical means for reuse. With all their business requirements in mind, Finn-Power was looking for a highly intuitive, low-threshold content management solution (CMS).

We tapped into our partner network and found Author-it to be the perfect fit with the customer’s requirements as it includes a translation management module that allows users to efficiently and effectively manage multilingual content. Author-it allows you to reuse content with a high level of granularity. While most CMS systems just let you reuse whole blocks of text, Author-it allows for text reuse on the sentence level, doing away with the need to define portions of text intended for reuse.

Said Ms Hanna Korpinen, Manager of R&D and Documentation:

”Now that we have also taken on this other important aspect of documentation, we are better positioned to provide quality documentation to our customers on-time and within budget!”

Copyright © 2013 Shufra Consultancy. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.