Bridging the Gap between Technical Communication and Translation

Webinar hosted by tekom Belgium: The processes of creating and translating/localizing information products are highly interwoven knowing that the content created by technical communicators along the product information life cycle will be translated and localized at a later stage. Globalization and digitization have caused a huge increase in the volume of translation of (mainly technical) content. Today, businesses create an average of 11 different information products that are translated into an average of 12 different languages (Schmitz and Straub 2016). Moreover, global information products are increasingly complex in nature. However, to date the processes of technical communication and translation tend to be largely isolated from each other, resulting in a loss of quality and costly or time-consuming issues during the localization process, i.e. ineffectiveness and inefficiency. Other critical factors that we see as responsible for widening the gap between content creation and localization are different training measures for both disciplines on the one hand, and source text deficiencies, translation problems, and incorrect terminology on the other hand. Therefore, we argue that the quality of translation is already determined during the content creation process in the source language. The aim of this webinar is to review ways to facilitate the translation and localization workflow and to foster the mutual understanding of both professions as well as interdisciplinary collaboration. It will be shown how gaps can be bridged by employing knowledge, understanding, and preferably reciprocal qualification, i.e. qualification in the respective “opposite” field (Meex and Straub 2016, Cleary et al. 2017), and by aligning the processes of authoring, translation, and publishing by means of industry standards, competence frameworks, and specific organizational and educational measures.status: Published onlin