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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. Language standardisation helps us to achieve a number of benefits. We become more consistent on a word level that starts with the simple fact that we are going to use the same word whenever we refer to the same thing, so that means an improved level of consistency. The same happens to sentence structures or phrases.

Followed this course last February and truly learned a lot. Shumin is very experienced and really knows what she is talking / teaching about. Recommended for all manual writers!

– Hans Harlé, Entecst Technical Communication

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 technical English training solutions tailored to meet your specific requirements. These courses are normally provided at the customer’s premises or at our offices in Singapore.

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

What will I learn?

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 and reliability
• Reduce AOG / downtime
• Facilitate machine and human translation
• Facilitate modular writing and reuse
• Facilitate teamwork
• 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.

Why standardise?

Standardisation is widely practised in manufacturing to realise economy of scale at the product level. Why not apply standardisation to documentation?

Data standardisation is cost saving by common sense. Injuries, losses and costly legal liabilities can occur as a result of unclear documentation and ambiguous translations. Just like the manufacturing industry makes use of standard components in their product assembly line, Simplified Technical English uses standard vocabulary in the ASD-STE100 specification and consistent industry-/product specific terminology to create documentation.

The borrowed concept of standardisation in the engineering world when translated into the technical documentation industry is based on standardised terminology and simple grammar rules.

The latter for instance, promotes the use of the active voice and simple present tense to clearly identify the doer of a particular action so as to avoid miscommunication and ambiguous translations during the localisation process. In a nutshell, we can draw a parallel between grammar rules and SOPs that both share a common purpose in streamlining processes in a straightforward and objective manner.

What is STE, and how does STE differ from Standard English and how do I know if this is right for my industry?

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is an international standard that helps to make technical documentation easy to understand. Simplified Technical English standardises vocabulary, grammar and style, while letting users control their specific terminology. Although Simplified Technical English originates from the aerospace and defence industries, it can easily be customised and applied to any other industry, including machinery, automotive, electronics, IT and medical equipment. Major manufacturers and the S1000D standard require the use of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

Simplified Technical English pays for itself

Our customer is a manufacturer of mobile X-ray based imaging solutions. They created an operator manual and a service manual in Standard English. This manual is to be translated into 7 other languages.

Before using Simplified English, the manuals had a total word count of 67,300 words. The number of pages was 454. In Simplified English, the word count came down to 49,600 words. The page count was reduced to 406.

Text in Simplified Technical English is easier to understand and may not even require translation. Where translation is needed, Simplified Technical English helps to drastically reduce translation cost and time-to-market, as it effectively eliminates redundant words and improves consistency.

The company thus saves almost EUR 21,000 or 35% on the translation of these manuals. For subsequent manuals, the savings would increase further thanks to better re-use and yield from translation memory.

With the ever increasing number of languages that companies need to deal with, these savings add up quickly. As content in Simplified Technical English is easier to validate, technical writers will be more productive, and fewer iterations and less rework will be required.

For this reason, the time-to-market is reduced by a similar percentage.

Editorial note: Based on feedback from readers, we would like to clarify that the cost reduction above is based on statistics from standard commercial memory tools, i.e. re-use on the sentence (segment level). This is brought by a combination of consistent style, vocabulary and terminology.