For organizations having global presence, to be successful in the foreign market one has to often depend on the documentation which is localized and properly rendered or translated. But localization and translation process can be tedious, costly and time consuming. Unable to keep up with the localization expenses, organizations often limit them or forgo them altogether.
With prior planning, localization expenses can be reduced substantially. However, this requires more than obtaining the best deal from the localization vendor. A lot of thinking goes in during the time of content creation or technical writing. Experience has shown that below mentioned 10 steps can cut your localization expenses by 50% or more without affecting the content’s effectiveness.
Top ten ways to save on Localization Expenses
Today information delivery is more complicated as information is delivered in a lot of different formats and is designed for discrete audiences. So, how to keep up with this evolution and deliver content in multiple outputs for different people? Single Sourcing is the answer to all your questions.
Single source publishing is a process where you create content in a single source and from this single source, you use processes that publish this content to several formats. For example, your documents might be published as online help (chm), PDF, and HTML. By using single sourcing for multiple types of output documents, you only need to create content once.
Technical writing is a field of professional writing on technical subjects. It is quite different from fiction or journalism. Fiction includes poetry, short stories, plays and novels. The goal of expressive writing is to express one’s feelings through description and narration. However, if we want to read about rocket science or brain surgery, we need a technical writer to tell us exactly what they mean.
Developers need to work with third party code to develop complete applications. In order to integrate the applications with third party code programmers need well written API documentation. API stands for Application Programming Interface. API Documents are also required to work on platforms (and develop applications) such as Intuit, Sun, Google and Salesforce.com.
As you draft and edit, it is helpful to keep in mind the effective ways to present sentences and paragraphs.
The objective of technical writing is to clearly convey some information to a select group of audience in a way that topic can straight away be understood.
Technical writing is a way of analyzing, generating and managing information about various products and technical procedures to be used in the generation of technical documentation.
Technical writers write and sometimes edit manuals, newsletters, user guides, online help files, reports etc. and many different types of text.
For big assignments, a technical writer has to work with a graphic and interface designer, many computer programmers etc. to design a huge website. But for smaller assignments or for smaller organizations the technical writer is expected to do the aforementioned task all by himself.
First and foremost thing for a technical writer is to recognize the target audience. Technical writers who know the target audience can advise and execute solutions to the problems that no one else can recognize.
Expertise required for Technical Writing
Technical writers must possess the aptitude to comprehend correctly and then be able to elucidate correctly.
