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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.

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.

“The ASD-STE100 course I attended by Shumin was very intensive yet enjoyable. Besides the standard format and company templates used when creating documentation, STE rules helped me understand that there is an alternative approach to technical writing. Top Qualities: Effective, versatile, high-quality training delivery.” Manufacturing Engineer, FNSS Defence Systems

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.

What training outcomes to expect?

Our interactive training, exercises and workshop, will teach participants 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
• Shorten review cycles
• Standardise content quality and style

Who should attend?

• Compliance managers
• Communication managers
• Content specialists
• Content strategists
• Content quality analysts
• CIO, COO, CTO
• Customer support managers
• Documentation specialists
• Editors
• Engineering managers
• Engineers and SMEs who create documentation
• Field support engineers
• HSE managers
• ILS managers
• Information developers
• International process managers
• Operation managers
• Product managers
• Programme managers
• Project managers
• Quality assurance managers
• Safety inspection engineers
• Service & Maintenance managers
• Supply chain managers
• Technical administrators
• Technical documentation consultants
• Technical information managers
• Technical linguists
• Technical publications managers
• Technology services advisors
• Technical writers
• Translation managers
• Translators

 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.

Suffice to say, STE is a controlled English language standard with a proven track record that spans more than 30 years.

Besides helping technical writing professionals achieve compliance with a well established technical writing standard, Shumin also finds STE the most versatile standard to try and get hold, get in control of our technical English communications.

This training workshop is hosted by Citec Finland, our preferred training partner in Finland.

Achieving Compliance and much more with Simplified Technical English (STE), by Shumin Chen at 01:50 PM CET

Safety starts with quality. The best product is only as good as its documentation and technical data allow the customer to make optimum use of it. Documentation is a vital and integral part of your product. 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.

In this session, Shumin will highlight some of the key benefits and identify rules of STE that can help to address 99% of the main challenges behind documentation processes, such as high cost, ease of translation, damage to product, delayed time-to-market and inadequate customer support.

The advantages of STE are most evident when creating documentation that will be translated into a number of languages. Text in STE is easier to understand and may not even require translation. Where translation is needed, STE helps to drastically reduce translation cost and time-to-market, as it effectively eliminates redundant words and improves consistency. As the text volume is reduced by at least 20% and the remaining text becomes more repetitive, the use of STE typically results in 30 to 40% less translation cost.

With the ever increasing number of languages that companies need to deal with, the savings add up quickly. In other words, Simplified English pays for itself. Moreover, the time-to-market is reduced by a similar percentage. As content in STE is easier to validate, technical writers will be more productive and fewer iterations and less rework will be required.

Who should attend?

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

About the speaker

Ms. Shumin Chen has a background in life sciences with a specialisation in biomedical sciences. She has worked as a consultant with customers in various industries worldwide, and is widely regarded as a leading expert in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English training, aviation documentation and multilingual documentation. In her current role with Shufrans TechDocs in Singapore, Shumin continues to focus on the practical implementation of international standards to facilitate the efficient creation and management of multilingual documentation.

Shumin now leads the ASD-STE100 training arm of Shufrans TechDocs. She received her professional on-the-job training in the field of STE under the tutelage of Dr Frans Wijma, a linguist, ILS consultant, documentation expert and private pilot who has been in the field of controlled language, multilingual documentation and aerospace & defence standards for 15 years.

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 170 companies.