The Dreamweaver project

At the start of this blogging assignment, I decided I would do a review of Dreamweaver and what shall forever be known as “the Dreamweaver project”. Two months later and twelve days before the Dreamweaver project deadline, the best review I can come up with is that Dreamweaver and HTML/CSS coding are an apt metaphor for the difference between understanding and doing.

The background

The background is simple. We created a storyboard for a small website. Now we have to develop this website in Dreamweaver. I have never designed a website nor used Dreamweaver before. I have enough knowledge of HTML and XML to understand most of the code when I read it. I thought that knowledge, access to w3schools.com, and more online research would be sufficient. How naive!

The process

I am now on my third attempt. First, I tried to create the website from scratch. The most accurate description for this attempt is a big, sarcastic “LOL”. Anyway, my template was almost correct, but I was stalling, I did not see how to untangle the situation, and I had to expect as much trouble with every feature I created.

I proceeded simultaneously with my second attempt (building the site as a table) and third attempt (using the only vaguely similar Dreamweaver template available) to see which one would be more efficient to handle. The Dreamweaver template won. My template index.html is not perfect, but I can improve it later on. For now, it’s functional and I have to move on.

Still, I have to downgrade my ambitions for this project from my storyboard. I asked my brother for his opinion on my storyboard because he is experienced in coding and web design. He is that person who will answer your questions with an obnoxious “Oh! That’s so obvious! Just do [something that is definitely not obvious].” So, hearing him say “You couldn’t start easy, could you?” was a relief.

I have had this feeling that expectations for this project are too high. Designing the storyboard with skewed expectations of my abilities, the learning curve, and the usability of Dreamweaver set me up for a world of failure and frustration.

Understanding vs doing

Like with any language, understanding the HTML/CSS code of a website and “writing” a website are two massively different things. My usual strategies for learning to write in a language would broadly include:

  1. Mastering the rules (grammar, syntax, keywords, etc.)
  2. Reading as much as possible to increase my vocabulary and internalise a natural writing style
  3. Writing content using what I have mastered and increasing complexity progressively

Based on my experience so far, coding is different from most languages I learnt before. There may be several, slightly different ways to code the same feature, but I find beginners have less freedom for creativity than with other languages.

For example, when in my third year of Russian, I had to write complex text analyses with a limited vocabulary, a pocket dictionary, and no Internet. As a beginner, I had to find ways to express myself with these limited resources. I had to rephrase my thoughts in simpler terms or terms that I could access. This is one of the hardest exercises I have ever done, but also one of the most useful for communication and learning in general.

I have tried to reproduce this process with this project without success despite access to incredible resources. I improve by small increments but reviewing how I solved each issue, I find that I solved my biggest issues through pure luck instead of identifying the root causes. I am trying to improve my skills by monitoring and analysing my progress, but I cannot consider luck as progress. A crucial piece is missing and I think it is a deeper understanding of HTML, CSS and web design rules, like how each coded feature interacts with the rest of the code. I would need a lot more time and overseen practice through e-learning courses for this.

Conclusion

No doubt the Dreamweaver has provided an opportunity for deeper learning, forcing me to evaluate and adapt my strategies. Unfortunately, the main strategy I can think of is to spend more time learning about the code and Dreamweaver through e-learning courses, but time is not an option anymore.

How much time would I need? My summer development project is coming up and I am supposed to build a much more complex website with Dreamweaver and WordPress. I have to keep in mind the overall development project and my priorities – the first is content design of a learning resource for the web, the second is WordPress hosting. The tool used is a secondary consideration. There’s the lesson of the Dreamweaver project.

That’s all, folks!

Virtual Team Project – Wrap-up

Our virtual project came to an end on Monday 25th March with the delivery of our English instructions and their French translation. Let’s wrap this up with a look back at Team 2s.

The project

Team 2 had ten members at its disposal to create and translate up to 1,200 words of instructions to help a non-technical audience to carry out a simple task in an online tool. With all team members having to maintain a blog during the semester and after agreeing that WordPress is less than intuitive for first-time users, the team set out to write instructions for beginners who want to set up their first blog in WordPress.

Team communication

Aren’t ten people a bit much to write and translate 1,200 words? Probably, but the point of the project was virtual collaboration. Collaborating with nine other people is challenging no matter the project. this was evidenced by our inability to find a suitable time for a single live team meeting over eight weeks.

If we were working full-time on this project, I would have expected my teammates to find the time for a live online meeting. But, on top of being spread out over four time zones, we all had jobs, studies, and other commitments to juggle. So, I did not push the issue. We already had the WhatsApp chat for live, on-the-go communication. I did not want to risk alienating one of our team.

That being said, I recognise that a live meeting would have been beneficial to break the ice and adjust our communication styles. Body language can be misleading, but it provides cues faster than written or phone communication. Instead, like most of the team, I tried to share about myself little by little in my messages, for example about other on-going assignments, and I brought in some emojis, but only the standard ones (smiling, laughing, crying) in non-ambiguous situations to avoid misinterpretation.

Another advantage of live online or face-to-face meetings is that they speed up decision-making. Live meetings with an agenda greatly improve productivity and certainty: people engage to make binding decisions in a defined timeframe. Only smaller details may need adjusting later through email or chat. I learnt that collaborating mostly through an online chat is more time-consuming, especially in our specific setup (see above). Sometimes, I had to “chase” members to get their input on a group decision. Did they not care or were they genuinely busy? I found gauging situations in an online chat even more arduous than in emails.

In general, I tried to stay positive in all our communications. Everyone will encounter difficulties, make errors and become frustrated at some point during a project. I have always found that I need to take a step back to re-frame my frustrations in a positive light. Despite the sense of urgency I feel when using WhatsApp, I forced myself to wait before answering messages, to try to rephrase my messages and consider other points of view. I used to do this as project manager, but I have not had to practise it as much as a translator, so I had to pay particular attention to knee-jerk reactions.

I also tried to point out our team’s progress regularly, focussing on all we had achieved and how “little” was left. I hoped this sense of achievement would maintain a positive mindset. Other team members also used this strategy, so I assume it resonated with them.

Leadership

I have been working in virtual teams for about ten years now, as project manager and translator, so I may have been more prepared than other teammates. However, I think no one is ever really completely prepared because each experience depends on the other virtual collaborators involved and the context.

As a translation project manager, my projects did not use to require all team members (vendors, salespeople, and clients) to interact. All communications and decisions went through me. This experience was quite different. Here, we were all collaborating live on WhatsApp and Google Drive. In addition, despite a variety of backgrounds and expertise, I felt that we were all qualified to give our input on all aspects of the project because this was the first experience for all of us. So my role was closer to a moderator, starting discussions, offering suggestions and trying to reconcile everyone’s input.

We had very few disagreements, which we resolved through votes if there was no single correct solution. However, I wonder if this means we were all in agreement with my suggestions, or if my teammates either thought I knew better from my experience or chose not to make their own suggestions. Given our context, I could understand the latter option. I just hope it was not the first option as I made sure to explain my approach several times.

The process

Writing

The writing team decided on a combination of alone work and collaboration. Within one weekend, we had the first draft with input from the four writers. I was not expecting this strategy, but it worked well for us. Each writer was able to feed on available content and to add their own input while keeping their own style. No one had to dedicate more than a few hours of their busy schedule and the writers could compare styles and make informed decisions on the most appropriate one.

I see how this strategy could easily become messy in a large scale project if an official writing style has not been agreed yet. However, I find this strategy was an effective way to play around with writing styles and learn from others. Also, it made each writer into a researcher and tester who had to go through the previous writers’ inputs before starting. No, the content was not 100% accurate in the first draft, but close. So, I think this strategy was a good decision from our writers for this project.

Then, over the two following weeks, the writers edited various drafts and I asked the whole team, including the translators, to give feedback to the writers. Given the pressure on the team to have the English instructions ready in about two weeks, I thought that having everyone’s input would be beneficial for the writers. Other team members were helpful, including the translators who noticed some inaccuracies. However, after a few editing loops, we started stalling. In hindsight, I would rather the writers edited and proofed in isolation until the final draft was ready for testing and final quality review. The QA team would have had a fresh look unencumbered by pre-existing knowledge.

Localisation

The translation process was quite smooth, at least from the English team’s point of view. One of the two translators acted as the main point of contact, and no questions or issues were pointed out in the English text. That is, there were small formatting issues that the translators corrected in the French, but they did not inform us despite our asking several times. Thankfully, it was nothing that our last proofreading would not have highlighted, but I am not sure what I would do to prevent this in future projects for non-obvious issues with a language unknown to me. I can only think of having a separate bilingual editor, one who has not worked on the translation.

This lack of communication during translation was disappointing because I explained to the translators how their input would be beneficial for the English text and for their teammates, and that non-translators would likely want to talk about translation in their blog posts. And one of the translators was active in our chats while we were writing the English text. I know this lack of teamwork is a common gripe among people working with translators, so I was disappointed that we did not lift the curse in our team despite communicating our expectations.

Finally, graphics localisation reminded me not to take my knowledge for granted. For me, it was obvious that localised graphics should look exactly like the source graphics and that graphics text should never be translated separately from the rest of the translation or using different resources. As both situations happened during the project, I realised that I had made assumptions based on my experience. I remember discussing the first issue during my translation degree and I know that non-translators may not be aware of the second issue. But this knowledge has become second nature and I forgot for a second that it is not universal. I will have to be more careful about this in the future.

The tools

Apart from Microsoft Word, we used three tools, Google Drive and Google Docs for storing and editing files, and WhatsApp for communication.

Google tools

Google Drive is a handy tool for sharing content. It took a second to master the sharing options. Other than that, I only have good things to say about it. The layout is clear, navigation is easy. We did not have any bugs. Google Drive kept its promise. Great!

Google Docs is another story. Overall, it is easy to use and intuitive, though I struggled to find some formatting options and it is not as rich as MS Word in terms of formatting. But the biggest issue is that it is prone to random formatting changes during editing and, if you implement formatting in Word and then open the Word file in Google Docs, some of the Word formattings will be corrupted and it will not be reinstated once you download again to Word. This means that once we implemented the final formatting on the instructions, we could not use Google Docs anymore.

Dropbox did not seem to have these issues for other teams. One Drive with Word 365 online might also be a good alternative if everyone can access it. I would be interested to collaborate either on Dropbox or One Drive to test whether they are efficient collaboration tools.

WhatsApp

I never used WhatsApp professionally, so I was anxious about that. I always keep my personal content off my professional tools and emails, so I was uneasy having both personal and professional chats hanging out next to one another. Nothing to hide, but also no valid reason to have both in such close proximity. For one, in the moments where I decided to rest my mind from work or studying, I did not enjoy receiving this project’s notifications while I was talking to friends in another chat.

Another issue was that discussion and decision-making were very messy at the beginning. So much to decide! Do we keep all topics in one group chat or do create several chats for each topic? In a tool like Slack, I would definitely go the route of “1 topic = 1 chat”. In WhatsApp, we kept one chat and nobody even suggested splitting topics in different chats. I suspect mayhem would have ensued. Instead, in the same chat, I would start a topic with a long summary message and I would try to have one message per question so that other members could use the Reply message option to answer a specific topic/ question. Then I would summarise the decisions we agreed on.

The first ten days or so, I maintained chat minutes every day. This is when we had the longest discussions and I thought a summary of who proposed what and what decisions we took would be helpful. Members would not have to go through the whole chat thread then. I abandoned those minutes once our chats became shorter and focused on editing feedback. I kept using the long message structure, so anyone looking for new questions or decisions could look for these messages specifically to get a summary of discussions and decisions.

WhatsApp is not all bad. It allows for more informal communication and for resolving issues on the go. However, for me, it is not adapted to the professional follow-up of a project.  I have never used a tool like Slack or Basecamp. Students in other teams used them and had good feedback about their usability and the learning curve, so I would like to try one of them in a future project.

Conclusion

Would I want to work in a virtual team again? It is very likely to happen given the nature of technical communication and the rise of remote work. Based on this experience alone, I have nothing against virtual teamwork in itself. Having worked in both virtual and face-to-face configurations, the main challenge really is the lack of cues that help to gauge a situation, like body language and tone. If you always work with the same team, this challenge fades progressively, especially with live online meetings. Otherwise, I find the configuration no less efficient than face-to-face teamwork as long as you have the right tools to facilitate collaboration.

The last stretch – the localisation review

Virtual Team Project – Week 8

No more experiments this week. The graphics designer created the French graphics while the translation team finalised the translation, then I reviewed the translation against the source English instructions.

The translation required very few edits, mostly small consistency edits in terminology and syntax, which are expected when two or more people collaborate on a translation. Even in a one-person translation team, typos and other issues are likely, especially after spending a long period of time on a project. Four weeks ago, I talked about how editing gets less efficient with each round of reviews. And even advanced spelling and grammar checker software will not spot some issues.

During my review, I noticed some localisations choices, but I also noticed small issues in the English that the French translators did not reproduce. For example, in one instance, the glossary definition of a term was inserted with the bookmarked term within the instructions. This must have happened after during the last review before I created the PDF because this insert is too obviously out of place to be missed during a review. And the French team did not reproduce this issue. Similarly, the bold formatting on some UI terms was missing in some English terms, but not in the French UI terms. Great for the translation, but we did ask the translators several times to inform us of such issues so that we could improve the English text.

I recognise that as translators, we spot a lot of small details or bigger issues in source texts, but I know that in many cases the translator feedback gets lost along the way back to the source writer. So, spending time on detailed feedback of typos, missing words, unclear sentences, etc., can be very frustrating. And sometimes, as happens with editing, the brain corrects an error without even registering the issue.

Still, we did ask the translators for feedback several times, so I was a bit annoyed. At least, there are no major edits in the English that would require extra work from the writing team. That’s a victory!

The translation is now ready and formatted. The translation team is letting it rest for a while before reviewing it one last time. Hopefully, we will be ready to deliver this weekend.

Next week: the final recap blog post…

Interviewing – part 2

Five weeks ago, I detailed my process for writing questions in preparation for a face-to-face interview with a technical communicator. The interview occurred last Friday and my report is now done. However, because of the 2,000-word limit, I have not been able to share what I have learnt about interviewing or any limitations in that particular experience. This is what I will try to do with this blog post.

The interviewee

My interviewee, A., was a perfect interviewee. Every question I asked got a thorough answer. I would say she talked for two to four minutes to answer each question. That is a lot of information. And she did not just repeat herself either, though she did repeat some information in order to back up her answers.

I found this redundancy very helpful while I was summarising the transcript before writing the report. What I usually do when I have to summarise content is that I first summarise and rephrase each section, or question, to highlight the themes that will structure the summary. Having call-backs to content in other sections or questions makes it easier to organise all those rephrased bits thematically. So this is definitely a characteristic of a good interviewee in my book. With a less prolific interviewee, I think my strategy would be to introduce that redundancy myself by asking him/her about links between topics, concepts.

If I identify one risk with a prolific interviewee, it is the possibility of straying off topic. The interviewee goes off on a tangent about something that is irrelevant to your purpose or they dive deep into details that are not in the scope of your assignment. Thankfully, that did not happen here. Not only is A. a professional technical communicator who interacts with SMEs daily, but she is also an alumnus of my university programme who did the same assignment a few years ago. She knew about the topics and constraints.

The subject of this interview experience is a limitation of this assignment in a way. As professional technical communicators, our interviewees may be too perfect. They know the drill because they are struggling every day (or not, I hope) to get the right amount of adequate, clear information. And if they can get that information in a way that facilitates structuring, even better. As A. mentioned, her first interactions with SMEs were difficult. SME interview struggles seem like a rite of passage where every communicator must find the strategies and questions that work best in each case.

The questions

When I prepared my forty questions, I wondered how I would have time to go through all of them. As I said above, A. answered several questions at a time. I think her background played a role there, but I also started the interview by stating all the topics I wanted to cover during the interview, which might have helped her to expand her answers while staying focused. Again, I would need a less cooperating interviewee to test that practice.

A.’s rich answers had a few consequences on the interviewing process. First, I chose to record the interview so that I could focus on her answers and limit note-taking. Not realising how long her first answer was going to be, I made a mental note to ask her about one detail she mentioned and another detail she did not provide regarding her role. Then, another detail. And another one. Of course, I forgot about a couple of those details by the end of her answer. Thankfully, the follow-up questions I forgot were details that only required a one-line email answer, but that was a rookie mistake. I am no longer the fast note-taker of my interpreting days and I got caught up in my interviewee’s speech. Note to self: go back to practising note-taking.

That error and the length of A.’s answers forced me to re-evaluate my strategy. A. answered several questions at the same time with extra info, but she never strayed from the scope, so I decided to prioritise questions that were likely to elicit the same type of answers and to phrase follow-up questions as mirror questions, summarising what A. had just said whenever she took a break and asking about any detail that caught my attention in her answer or any information she had not yet given me. For example, A. mentioned that most of her team members work from a different location or from home and that she sometimes works from home, so I followed up later on with “So, you and your team work from different locations…” A. being the “perfect interviewee”, she answered with the right information before I could even finish my question.

This sounds like an obvious strategy, but I was extremely self-aware at the time that I was listening to A. while trying to determine from her answer what would be the best follow-up question to elicit the maximum amount of relevant info and rephrasing that question in a conversational style. The fact that A. and I have very similar academic and professional backgrounds helped as we immediately established a good rapport. As a result, A. adopted a conversational style where I was able to bounce off phrases like “as you know”, “you know how it is”.

Though it is very unlikely that such a situation will occur often in future interviews, I expect it will be worthwhile looking for similar opportunities to break the ice, like looking for common interests. If that is not an option, I guess that the most basic ice-breaker would be to show that I have researched the topic and that, at least, I understand the basics.

Conclusion

Interviewing a professional technical communicator may not be a perfect simulation for an SME interview, because the professional communicator has internalised good interviewing practices. However, the combination of preparing detailed questions and a prolific interviewee forced me to adapt my questions, my attitude and my interviewing style during the interview. It also helped to consider how I could adapt my strategies for different types of interviewees.

Who should localise the graphics?

Virtual Team Project – Week 7

This week, the translation team worked away on the translation and the French graphics. They now have an almost final draft which requires some editing and formatting. However, my fears about the graphics have materialised.

When the translation team said they would take care of the French graphics, I was on the fence.

On one hand, they are in the best position to get the most accurate French screenshots, because they are accessing each screen during the translation. Also, they know both languages so they can easily match the French to the English, whereas our graphics designer is Irish and may not have the necessary level in French to do that matching work as quickly. I am sure he could do it, but it would take more time.

On the other hand, graphics design is another complex task that requires specific skills and tools. It’s one thing to dabble in Photoshop and to know how to edit photos and how to create simple drawings, it’s another thing to create elaborate graphics from screenshots and to be able to replicate the same process multiple times.

I had to create localised graphics as a project manager and maybe my more than inadequate skills in graphics design influence my opinion, but I think the graphics design skills should take precedence in graphics localisation. Give the designer the right screenshots and you should be fine. Give a non-designer the right design tools and I’m not sure you will get the right results. The non-designer might do great work, but it will be harder to recreate identical designs.

Nevertheless, the translation team showed a lot of confidence that they could take care of the graphics, so I decided not to push my preferences. This is one aspect of teamwork that might be the hardest to manage. Knowing when you should push back and impose a decision vs knowing when to take a step back and accept that other options might work just as well.

Today’s experience is timely. The person I interviewed for our interview assignment yesterday mentioned this as one of the biggest challenges of leading a team. In a team, everyone is an expert in an area and values their own input. One of the project manager’s jobs is to balance these egos, including his/her own. And I don’t mean “ego” in a negative, self-centered sense.

Our timeframe played a significant role in my decision. If we had to turn around the translation and the localised graphics within a few days only, I would have tried to impose the graphics designer option. However, this assignment is about honing our collaboration skills and trying new working strategies – and we had four weeks. Also, we agreed that the graphics designer would review the graphics and might intervene if necessary.

This weekend, the translation team shared their draft with localised graphics. The graphics are of high quality, with a good resolution and some interesting ideas, but they are very different from the source graphics. I had not anticipated this. It was obvious to me that the localised graphics should be identical to the source graphics (except for the text, obviously). However, the translators did their own thing here. I have never seen localised graphics that are completely different from the source graphics except when the available localised content is also completely different, which does not happen that much. I do wonder if that might happen more than what I have experienced…

This particular project is a valuable experiment in graphics design if only because it shows that different designers may come up with highly different graphics to showcase the same information, and all options may be valid. Still, with only one week left, we cannot spend more time experimenting. Other team members agreed that our graphics designer should take care of the localised graphics in order to ensure a consistent look across languages, and the translation team has provided him with the screenshots. We are now on the last stretch of this project and everything seems under control. We do not have any other “experiment” in progress, so I am cautiously confident.

Communicating your value as a technical communicator

Thinking about our e-portfolio assignment, the part I dread is redesigning my CV, because I tend to fixate on the next step – recruitment interviews. I consider myself lucky that I haven’t done a lot of them, but those I did were mostly awkward. Communicating my value makes me uncomfortable. Give me something to do to prove my value instead! That’s a pretty common trait, right?

As I was searching for CV inspiration and wondering how I could ever quantify my contributions (as suggested by many pieces on writing CVs) except in volume translated, I came across this 2017 seven-part essay by Tom Johnson of I’d Rather Be Writing on the “Value arguments for docs and tech comm”. Here, I will focus on what I learnt from part 2 but I highly recommend the whole essay.

Quantifying the value of technical communicators

Summarising past research into the topic, Johnson explains that technical communicators can encounter difficulties in communicating their value to business managers. Return on investment continues to be the #1 indicator, which means managers try to quantify the value of documentation and technical communicators in terms of increased benefits and reduced costs.

The issue for technical communicators is that the impact of their communication products is harder and takes longer to quantify. How do you measure the impact that technical communication has on other activities? How can you know how much of the reduction in support tickets is due to improved documentation? Communicating value through quantified ROI may also emphasize cost reductions at the expense of quality in many other aspects of the business: cut the documentation budget and training may suffer, support costs may increase, and customer attraction and retention may be impacted.

Shaping perceptions

In today’s knowledge economy, technical communicators have an opportunity to communicate their value as knowledge creators who can influence core activities (e.g., product design) thanks to their role as mediators between business stakeholders (designers, engineers, etc.) and customers. For businesses, this influence can translate into a competitive advantage that is not measurable through metrics like clicks. To convey their value, Johnson explains that technical communicators should rely on how these other business stakeholders perceive their value and they should make sure that these perceptions are shared with decision makers. A bit like having a company employee showing up to your job interview to promote your application. That would be neat!

This is where I go “deep learning” and relate to my experience. I have encountered translation agency instructions that referred to translation as something “basic” for end customers. Needless to say, I took great issue with specialist providers of translation referring to the very service they provide as basic – especially when there was a grammar mistake in said instructions. If you don’t see the value in your own business, how can you promote it to your customers and employees other than by implementing cost reductions at their expense? This is bound to reflect on your brand and the industry.

Similarly, when I started in translation, I had no clue about my value and how to communicate it. As a translation project manager, I was often told that I “do not need to bother the Salespeople/customer with that much detail”. Fair enough, but I think giving details is more beneficial than the opposite as long as you organise your communication so that the customer can get a clear overview and skip the details:

  • You manage the customer’s expectations.
  • You give the customer a clear reference they can use before contacting you in case of doubt.
  • You show your dedication to them.
  • You show that your quotation is legitimate.
  • And yes, you are communicating your own value over the competition without referencing them.

As a freshly-installed freelance translator, I was not very self-confident, so I felt compelled to prove myself by laying out clear, detailed explanations for my processes, terminology choices, editing feedback, etc. Would I prefer to spend those 15+ minutes on something else? Absolutely. But, somehow, no project manager took issue with the details and soon enough I was assigned the bigger, more complex projects with managers asking my opinion on what process to implement. Some project managers even suggested I increase my rates (they probably shouldn’t have said that). I guess this was time well spent then.

Self-employment is not for everyone. However, having to differentiate myself from huge rosters of translators on a regular basis built up my self-confidence and did wonders for my revenue by shaping my direct requesters’ perception of me.

Conclusion

Reading Johnson’s post and looking back on my own experience, it seems that, in technical communication, having your value recognised results not only from consciously processing and presenting your decisions (e.g., with an e-portfolio) but also from shaping other people’s perception of you. This is important not only to promote yourself as an individual communicator but also to promote your department within the business. Reading Johnson’s essay, it seems that starting this conscious work of shaping perceptions as early as possible in one’s technical communication career is at least one way to avoid depending on inadequate quantified metrics.

References

Johnson, T. (2017) ‘Value arguments for docs and tech comm (Part II)’, I’d Rather Be Writing, 28 December, available: https://idratherbewriting.com/2017/12/28/value-of-tech-comm-in-company-part2/[last access 14 March 2019].

On self-doubt and going back to school

Virtual Team Project – Week 6

I have to admit that it is getting harder to talk about our virtual team project now that the instructions are in translation. The translation team is working on it and they have not asked any questions. So far, so good? We will check in with them at the start of the week to ensure everything is going according to plan with the translation and the localisation of the graphics.

I have offered to do a review on the translation, but I am already questioning the validity of my input even though I am a translator and I used to be a translation project manager. As other students have told me, our group is in a unique position, but I do not feel more comfortable as a result, quite the opposite.

My pop culture-filled brain when thinking about this project (meme generated on imgflip.com)

Why? Even if this project simulates a professional project, I think it is the academic environment. I sometimes have this feeling that I haven’t felt since I finished college the first time. The pressure of meeting academic expectations seems more intense than the pressure I have felt in business environments. Not that I do not take my professional occupations seriously. Quite the opposite. And there are intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in both environments.

No, in this particular case, I think that the distinction between professional and academic environments is that, in a professional environment, I know I am qualified to do the job and collaborators inherently trust my expertise (I hope). On the other hand, I expect the academic environment to assess and validate constantly whatever task I undertake and this intensifies my doubts. Do other people feel this distinction? Is this only a remnant of my upbringing?

For this translation, my input may clash with the expectations of the French university professor. To everyone who asks me “Why not work for the EU? Or the UN?” (this happens a lot), I answer that apart from not being interested, I would most likely fail the exams because their expectations are so removed from the expectations of my preferred environment: business and technical translation.

This might be the same with academic translation. For example, anglicisms (in terminology or style) were frowned upon in my translation Master’s programme, so I would never use them. However, in a business context, I had to learn to use them to match customer preferences. Some anglicisms were harder to swallow and I had to push back on others that were plain wrong. But a wrong anglicism is hard to prove to a stubborn customer. That’s where experience comes in. Yes, our audience is made up of non-technical users, but our “customer”/assessor may have specific requirements.

I would be curious to find out how our team’s translation will fare, to see how it matches my expectations. As for reviewing the translation, we are lucky that the product exists in French with a glossary, so I will stick to comments and questions, and I will let our two translators be the experts. They have insights into the “customer”.

Trust in communication

On Thursday 7th March, the University of Limerick held its first Technical Communication and E-Learning Research Day, with presentations from Louisiana Tech University professors Kirk St Amant and Nicholas Bustamente, students from Lousiana Tech’s VISTA programme (Visual Integration of Science Through Art) as well as UL faculty and PhD candidates. While each presenter focussed on a specific field and topic, from healthcare and medical to e-government, education and enterprise cloud software, one theme was recurring either implicitly or explicitly: trust.

Note: This post describes my interpretation of this event’s presentations.

Technical communicators are vectors of trust

The Society for Technical Communication (STC) provides a broad definition of technical communication as “the discipline of transforming complex information into usable content for products, processes, and services” and provides ethical principles to guide technical communicators: legality, honesty, confidentiality, quality, fairness, and professionalism. The emphasis on answering user needs and promoting the public good implies that technical communicators should be trustworthy, though gaining and maintaining the trust of the audience does not feature explicitly as an objective of technical communicators.

Healthcare and medical

In health and medical contexts – in particular, in international contexts – any communication efforts will be in vain if you ignore the obstacles resulting from your audience’s context that could hinder adoption, like literacy and the physical and social contexts. To show how ignoring the audience’s expectations can damage the communicators’ credibility and be detrimental to the message, Professor St Amant used the example of Wonder Woman. In Central America, Superman and Wonder Woman comics were used to tell kids about the danger of land mines, but Wonder Woman’s perceived salaciousness meant that she was not as popular with parents. To convince Central American parents to give
Wonder Woman comics to their children, DC Comics had to redesign Wonder Woman with a more modest costume.

Similarly, Margaret Grene’s research showed that both the patients’ health literacy and the language used in health communication can impact patients’ health outcomes. Let’s consider the fact that half of the participants in Grene’s health literacy study gave correct answers to less than half of the questions. If we extrapolate this result, this means that a big part of the population may not be able to rely on health communications to make informed decisions regarding their health because these communications are not fit for purpose.

And it is not only about using plain English either. As was noted by participants in a redesign of inhaler instructions in Grene’s study, oversimplification can also hinder comprehension if the language is not precise enough. Health communication users may have no other choice than to trust the content, but health communicators must walk a fine line giving accurate information that is also accessible and respectful of users’ contexts. Losing health users’ trust can have grave consequences as the current “vaccination hesitancy” trend has shown. The fact that the World Health Organization prioritises the distribution of “trusted, credible information on vaccines” to curb this trend highlights the ethical imperative on technical communicators to place users’ trust at the heart of their mission.

Government, education and the private sector

Three other presentations showed how communication strategies impact trust in users. Pam Wall, who is researching communication heuristics in e-government, argued that, in evaluating the efficiency of online government interfaces, communication is often neglected to focus on user interface engineering and other technical aspects. However, communication breakdowns are just as likely to hamper the trust of e-government service users. Designing a framework to evaluate the efficiency of e-government communication could help to normalise practices that promote trust.

Similarly, Elaine Walsh argues that formalising assessment brief content in higher education can foster a more trusting relationship between students and assessors by removing the uncertainty and the disagreements that can result from briefs that are unclear or missing helpful information. While some assessors and students in Walsh’s research argued that the new briefs could be too long and that students may not read them from start to finish, one student said he might not read the whole brief, but he still likes to know that he has all the information at hand. As a communications user, I relate to that comment.

As more and more online communication becomes topic-based, even “molecular”, and chatbots become the primary contacts for user assistance, I am one of those users who often struggle to “converse” with chatbots and to decipher how automated user helps want me to phrase my questions. I like to know where and how I can find all the answers in order to complete whatever task I am doing at the moment. And unless I have no choice but to use a certain tool, I will abandon it if I need human assistance at every turn.

This is where Rachael Hewetson’s research comes into play. She argues that the move of enterprise software from on-premises solutions to the cloud has put business software companies in a precarious position in terms of customer retention. The cloud technology fosters competition by reducing the cost and complexity of switching providers. On the other hand, the cloud takes some of the power away from customers as updates are now pushed to them. In that context, product adoption is no longer about convincing customers to install an update. It becomes about assisting customers to build their trust in the new functions and in their ability to use these functions. Cloud technology means that businesses have to work harder to maintain customer trust and loyalty.

Hewetson described how a people-centric approach to user assistance may help to build customer trust by addressing the customers directly with a more conversational tone, providing just-in-time assistance together with more traditional user communications like manuals, etc., providing feedback channels and engaging with users on social media. This people-centric approach recognises the technical communicators’ importance in the post-sale customer experience, and even at the pre-sale stage because more and more prospective customers engage with businesses on social media before making a purchase decision. Technical communicators play a role in attracting and retaining customers and they need to adopt new communication styles and strategies that build and maintain trust and loyalty.

Trust in the communicator/ requester relationship

To finish this Thursday’s research day, four students of Louisiana Tech’s VISTA programme presented some of the visual works they have created in collaboration with scientific researchers and other healthcare collaborators. I am not going to discuss their work in detail because it is truly fascinating and would require a separate post, but I encourage everyone to visit the VISTA website to see some samples.

In describing their works, each of the four students explained the challenges – and the responsibility – of researching and representing a topic in a field that you have limited or no specialised knowledge of, like microbiology, mental health, professional translation, etc.

To best serve the consumers of these visual works, the communicator/ requester collaborations required trust. The students repeated several times that they had to rely on the expertise of their requesters, whether they were researchers, health professionals, publishers, etc., but they also had to gain the trust of these requesters by asserting their expertise as visual communicators. To build this trust, each party had to learn to communicate its needs reliably in a language that the other party understands.

These students experienced that clear communication and trust are not only objectives for professional communicators, but also pillars of their work processes. The awareness and the confidence gained from these practical experiences give them an invaluable advantage at the start of their careers as professional visual communicators.

References

Mangles, C. (2017) ‘The rise of social media customer care’, Smart Insights, 5 December, available: https://www.smartinsights.com/customer-relationship-management/customer-service-and-support/rise-social-media-customer-care/[last access 9 March 2019].

Society for Technical Communication (n.d.) Ethical Principles, available: https://www.stc.org/about-stc/ethical-principles/[last access 9 March 2019].

World Health Organization (n.d.) Ten threats to global health in 2019, available: https://www.who.int/emergencies/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019 [last access 9 March 2019].

Musings on informal deadlines

Virtual Team Project – Week 5

Since my last post on Saturday 23rd February, our team did two more rounds of review on the English instructions before we delivered them to the translation team on Monday 25th. The rest of the week was very quiet. Because our two translators were on their winter break, the rest of the team was able to rest as well, or at least we were all able to take a step back from the project and focus on other courses and assignments

Of course, we could not escape last minute changes. Several members of our team reviewed the final instructions during the weekend, including a dedicated “final proofreader”, and they highlighted small details that had managed to evade our attention until then. Editing and reviewing really are never-ending tasks that require commitment and open communication until the very end. Nevertheless, we prevailed and had the document ready by the deadline.

Speaking of the deadline, there was no official deadline per se, though many of us in our team (including myself) and in other teams assumed we had to hand in this first draft to our module directors on Monday 25th February even though it would not be graded. That was not the case. The confusion may stem from the assignment brief mentioning that we should “submit” the first draft by Monday 25th February. Or we might all be obsessing over deadlines these days.

But I wonder… Would the English draft have been ready for translation by Monday 25th February if we thought this was a “soft” deadline? In a real-life project, checking the meaning of deadlines would have been a priority. In this project, it seemed that, official or not, this deadline was meant to provide us with guidance and structure. Without a clear, official deadline, would delays have been more likely? I think so, and it would have been harder for me as project manager to justify my pushing back in that case. Even when there are no official deadlines for a project or a task, setting an informal deadline forces people to define a structure and a plan for action, and to stick to them. And it improves accountability.

As a freelance translator, most of my deadlines are short (so short), formal deadlines. Even then, I usually set other informal deadlines for translation and proofreading tasks, for administrative tasks, private business, etc. When I started freelancing, financial uncertainty was the biggest source of stress. It still is. This led me to accept any and all projects and I was quickly drained of all energy. I had to learn to set personal goals and deadlines and, most importantly, to stick to them.

The last part was more difficult, but I finally learnt to say “no” for my health. I have somewhat “fell off the wagon” as I juggle freelancing and the Master’s programme and the second semester is especially demanding. Not knowing when the next translation request will come in makes it difficult to organise my time by setting personal deadlines. Fortunately, financial uncertainty aside, freelancing means I can say “no” to work requests, which is not an option for many of my fellow students. I wonder how they cope with their workloads, studies and private lives.

On picking colours

I was about to write a detailed post on picking colours for web design, but I am not sure that I have things under control yet in that department. The several dozens of tabs open in my browser mirror the state of my brain – chaos reigns. I miss the days when the only answer expected of me to the question “Why did you pick these colours?” was “Because they look nice.”

This week, I am drafting the proposal for a digital learning resource – a small website showing users of all ages and backgrounds how to spot fake profiles and contents on social media. This is a multi-layered challenge and one of these layers is picking colours while ensuring accessibility.

Of course, we have studied colour theory and accessibility issues in the programme, but putting it all into practice is another matter. Having trouble putting theory into practice might become a recurring theme on this blog. Unlocking my inner designer is taking more time, dedication, and support than any of my previous endeavours. This is why I am glad I enrolled in this MA instead of trying to self-teach. I got detailed feedback on my summer project two days ago. Being able to discuss with my supervisor some design details that have been bothering me has been a great help.

But back to the colours. Even though the same colour and accessibility theories apply to my summer project and this week’s proposal, I have had to change my colour-picking strategy.

For my summer project, I chose a colour palette that is linked to my topic and to a geographical area and its traditions, in order to convince the most reluctant members of my audience, who are likely to be attached to that area. This sentimental colour palette seemed the obvious choice.

The current proposal is different. The objective of this small website is purely factual and instructional. It needs to be as objective and neutral as possible in order not to alienate part of the audience. I want to use three distinct colours to differentiate my three main topics/cards. But I want to avoid matching the colours of the three social networks I am fact-checking (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). And I need to ensure accessibility. For now, I am set on dark blue, green and dark yellow. The colours passed the contrast checks, but I am still testing other colours. I can’t help but think that something is missing. I am playing around with greys and muted colours for the navigation bar and background. I already have three very different colours for the cards, so my choices are limited. Uncoloured black-and-white cards would give me more freedom, but the colours are useful for the user to locate information instantly. Also, older children and teenagers are part of the audience, so a colourful user experience could help reach my instructional objective.

“Remember, sometimes the colors you like best are not necessarily the colors you need the most!” While looking for colour inspiration, I came across this quote after I took Lori Weitzner’s Ode to Color Analysis quiz. Though Weitzner’s focus is on interior design, her quote certainly applies to web design as well!