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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.

Course outline*

• Participants have the flexibility of attending a 1, 2, or 3-day training session with us.
  • Day 1: Classroom Training
    1. Practical overview of ASD-STE100 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.
  • Day 2: Application, Review, & Exercises
    1. Approved and non-approved words discussion and the rationale behind.
    2. How to deal with industry-specific terminology
    3. How to use STE for various documentation types
    4. How to implement STE with minimal disruption to on-going production and existing documentation
  • Day 3: Extended Writing Workshop
    1. Practical workshop session for applying STE rules to your own documents
    2. Review, edit, and discuss participants’ own documents to reinforce learning
    3. 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.

Learning how to optimally use a documentation standard like ASD-STE100 is a substantial boost to our technical writing team’s capabilities and significantly improved our compliance rating! Raja Sureshbabu, Global Head of Aerospace Vertical, Tata Consultancy Services.

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.

It is important that operation and management information be understandable to the target audience. Sometimes, operation information is conveyed through a less-than-optimum selection of words. The manufacturer’s technical language can result in incomprehensible operation documentation.

Governance of Picture Archiving and Communications Systems: Data Security and Quality Management of Filmless Radiology, Carrison K.S. Tong, Eric T.T. Wong, Human Factors & Culture, 2009

English is the de facto language for almost all industries, including healthcare where communication is crucial to ensure operational efficiency and accuracy. Without good communication among healthcare professionals such as referring medical doctors, technologists, radiologists, clinicians, nurses, suppliers, maintenance and service engineers would imply that high quality standards become impossible to maintain.

Human errors can be expensive, lead to accidents, and risk product quality

More often than not, operation information is conveyed through a less-than-optimum selection of words. To cite a real-life example of a maintenance procedure where a certain step was ‘proscribed’ meaning prohibited, the technical personnel who read this instruction decided that the procedural step was ‘prescribed’ and hence recommended. Regrettably, he proceeded to carry out the prohibited action with dire consequences.

New manuals, job cards, operations and maintenance service bulletins are prime examples of documentation that must be proofread and beta-tested before being widely circulated. Proportionately, the labour costs involved in such documentation management processes can be immensely high.

 

Document complexity & volume

With the latest medical products and technology made available on the market, the increasing complexity and volume of medical data and healthcare information that must be created, recorded, integrated and managed cannot be avoided. Indeed, voluminous and complex writing that read very differently since they must have been supplied by various product manufacturers can negatively impact hospital’s operations when misread or misinterpreted. Volumes of user manuals from various sources with at times overlapping information also seem impossible to store and manage usefully.

A popular example in the aerospace industry is the well-known paper stack from aircraft manufacturers that supposedly exceeds the height of Mount Everest. Paper documentation support the work of aircraft operators. Airlines used to afford warehouses full of such paper stacks that document historical records of their aircraft maintenance. All of which proved too expensive to maintain later on.

Consequently, unmanageable volumes of text, document complexities, time-critical operations, as well as the growing proportion of healthcare workers whose first language is not English, all point to the need for a unifying English language standard that would allow the community to speak with one voice and convey critical information using fewer words.

Create manuals that speak with one voice

Safety begins with quality. Even the best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data, which allow the customer to use it safely and effectively.

Many incidents identified in the healthcare industry revealed poor technical understanding and communication due to missing user manuals, inadequately described operating instructions, and badly maintained  equipment that add to the series of errors and accident occurrences.

Let’s take a close look at the following case study excerpt. Our customer is a manufacturer of mobile X-ray based imaging solutions. They created an operator manual and a service manual in Standard English that was subsequently edited in a controlled language known as Simplified Technical English (STE).

Standard English: inconsistent tone and excessive use of words

Control Panel Both the C-arm stand and the monitor cart have a control panel. The two control panels always show the same screen, enabling you to use them for system operation.Depending on the selected function, other controls (buttons, input boxes, displays, etc.) will appear on the control panel screen.The Vision Center control panel is designed as a touch screen. For system operation, just press the desired button or option directly on the touch screen.

STE: uniform tone of voice and standardised sentence structure

Control Panel The C-arm stand and the monitor cart each have a control panel screen. These screens show the same control panel. Each panel lets you operate the system. The panels have different controls for different functions.The control panel is a touch screen. To operate the system, touch the correct button or option.

At the time our customer was writing a range of user and maintenance manuals  for their X-ray imaging equipment. Although the manuals were created and edited by more than 10 technical writers in a team, our customer wanted all manuals to read like they came from one single source. STE provided a cost-saving and easily implemented solution as evidenced by the rewritten STE sample text highlighted above.

Say it better with fewer words

The implementation of STE in the healthcare sector proved to be a great success. Using a smaller number of words with defined meanings and parts of speech, while adopting a simplified English language structure meant that user manuals now provide a highly consistent and unambiguous tone of voice with a 20% reduction in text volume. Above all, healthcare professionals depend on reliable documentation to operate medical devices and equipment safely and efficiently. STE therefore helps medical equipment manufacturers meet documentation compliance requirements, and can also increase the efficiency and productivity of their employees.

To summarise, an instruction found in a technical procedure must never become a case of interpretation. Work instructions communicated in technical manuals must be concise and let the user or maintenance personnel do their jobs properly, putting patient safety first and foremost.

Why Simplified Technical English (STE)?

Whether you are looking to implement working standards such as DITA, S1000D, ATA iSpec 2200, RailDex, or ShipDex to standardise your information structure and facilitate content re-use, it is important to give due consideration to the quality of your source text when creating your technical content. Ambiguous or inconsistently worded documentation can result in non-compliant data deliveries, poor customer support, potential legal liabilities, equipment damage, as well as safety risks.

A well-written source text ensures the ease of downstream content management processes such as translations

Improved readability for your technical content

STE prescribes the use of grammar rules that are relatively more restrictive than the standard rules of the English language.

The general vocabulary has only 900 approved words while explicitly listing 1500 other non-approved words with alternative suggestions.

By introducing these grammar and vocabulary restrictions, technical authors can avoid writing overly long sentences and leave out unnecessary technical details where applicable, all of which are obstacles to the ease of readability and sound understanding.

Recommended by global documentation standards

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.

Although the S1000D standard was originally intended for the aerospace and defence industry, this widely successful specification has been customised for the shipping and train manufacturing and operations communities giving rise to both ShipDex and RailDex. Likewise, sound and consistent STE writing rules are highly applicable and practical for use across industries.

Simplifying or eliminating the need for translations?

STE is an international aerospace standard that helps to make technical documentation easy to understand. However, the benefits of STE have proven very highly applicable to all industries. That is why 60% of STE users today come from industries outside of aerospace & defence.

Understandably, STE was designed with non-native speakers of the English language in mind. By providing technical writers with a common set of standardised writing rules and general vocabulary, STE enables teams of writers to write technical manuals that are consistently accurate and require less proofreading and editing effort. Consequently, this does away with the need for translations altogether.

Besides the aerospace maintenance industry however, product exports are still subjected to much scrutiny in terms of their paperwork, documentation and associated product translations. Therefore, the use of STE to create technical content can support downstream translation processes in several ways:

• A 900-word general vocabulary dictionary eliminates the need for other non-approved, and possibly uncommon synonyms. This reduces the likelihood of term-related clarifications and queries from translators, resulting in faster translation processes.
• Enforcing STE rules strictly guarantees a high level of consistency at word-, phrase-, and sentence-levels.  This allows project managers to leverage on existing translation memories to substantially reduce translation costs.
• With fewer technical terms to translate and a more uniform translation memory, translators can provide cheaper, faster and better translations thanks to STE.
• Having STE content in place will result in exceptional translation quality with machine translations as well.

In a nutshell

For many years now, the use of STE as a controlled language authoring strategy has successfully taken off not just at large organisations, but also in small and medium enterprises.

With professional Simplified Technical English training that costs only a fraction of supposed “full implementation”, and yet achieves 75% – 85% of the benefits and results of an approach that includes checker software, getting started with STE is no longer the major and expensive investment it used to be.

Training technical writers and engineers to write in STE within two to three days may sound like a simple and straightforward undertaking. However, to change the way your technical authoring team works does require some managerial direction while the team transits to STE. Trained technical writers will experience on a more regular basis, the many benefits that STE as a controlled language writing strategy offers.

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English and Six Sigma

Below, we will outline the basic synergy between Six Sigma and Simplified Technical English.

An important Six Sigma method is known as DMAIC:

• Define the project goals
• Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data
• Analyse the data to identify root defects
• Improve or optimise the current process based on the data collected
• Control the new process to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected before they result in defects

In the domain of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English in relation to content creation and content management (authoring, editing, change management, version management), the basic parallel is:

• Define the writing rules
• Mine legacy data
• Analyse the data to identify the common violations
• Improve the documentation by applying the relevant rules
• Check the documentation to ensure correct and consistent use of the rules, thus reducing the number of violations and improving output quality

Our ASD-STE100 working model

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English provides the baseline set of writing rules that can be used as objective parameters to measure content quality. Shufrans TechDocs can extract relevant error information from your legacy publications, helping to identify the main problem areas. We then train your staff in effectively applying the rules that remedy these problems.The delivered content aims to provide key decision support for further STE implementation across departments and future technical writing projects.

Finally, we help you to implement and form of Simplified Technical English checker software to monitor and control the content creation and output. The exact implementation will be based on your existing or planned documentation process and entails many variables.

Your bottom line impact

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English involves all aspects of the documentation life cycle. It looks to make significant improvements in your content creation and content management workflow. Typically, text written in Simplified Technical English will show a 20 to 30% reduction in text volume without any information loss and at least a 60% increase in readability and user-friendliness. As the text volume is reduced by at least 20% and the remaining text becomes more repetitive, the use of Simplified Technical English typically results in 30 to 40% less translation cost.

After all, the best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data allow the customer to make optimum use of it without stretching the budget too far.

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