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:
- Singapore, 3 – 4 March 2016
- Hyderabad & Bangalore, India, 10 – 15 March 2016
- Berlin, Germany, 4 – 5 April 2016
- Tiel, the Netherlands, 21 – 22 April 2016
- Helsinki, Finland, 9 – 10 May 2016
- 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.
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