Guest Post by Joseph Campo, Senior Member, Boston Chapter
I grew up at a time when the world was a lot bigger. There was no email or Internet or even cell phones. We used to write air-mail letters, or pay $4 per minute for international calls. Anything beyond your sight and senses was foreign. For some reason, I was fascinated with languages for as long as I can remember. I always thought about how cool it would be to travel the world and meet people from other cultures. Maybe this comes from spending time with my grandparents, who were from the Ukraine on one side and from Italy on the other.
Whatever it was, I always felt comfortable in language classes. I had an inspirational language teacher in high school and ended up studying French, German, and Spanish in college. I studied in France, and later on worked in Geneva and Zurich. I got to travel quite a bit too, and this solidified my love of languages.
So when I started working as a technical writer at SolidWorks in 2000, I was of course fascinated with the possibility of using my languages again, because we translated our documentation in-house into about 10 languages at the time. As it has turned out, I haven’t used my languages as much as I hoped, but because of my language experience I am very sensitive about the importance of languages. For most any business these days, localization is the key to expansion, or maybe even just plain survival.
Businesses are always looking for ways to save money. About six years ago, I started thinking about ways that our technical writers could save money, and localization was my first thought. Somehow, we should be able to match what our translators are writing, or better match what they already translated. Eventually this thought led to this project that I am presenting in the STC webinar on Tuesday, 23 March: Optimizing the Source Using Translation Memory. I’ll discuss my project from 2006, from hypothesis to results and conclusions.
If you localize your documentation, you would find this webinar’s information of interest. The webinar will last about 35 to 40 minutes, and afterwards I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
Joseph Campo is the Manager of Technical Documentation at DS SolidWorks Corporation based in Concord. You can reach him at Joseph.Campo@3ds.com. You can also visit his website at www.jbcampo.com.