4-97 (December 1997)
Italy
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4-97 (December 1997)
Italy
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Dear Ron,
First of all I would like to introduce myself. My name is Marcella Lazzari and I am working in a subsidiary of a multinational company based in Italy, where I am responsible for the Technical Publications department.
So I am not an independent technical communicator, but I am very interested in getting in touch with the TCs you mentioned in your article! In our company English is the official communication language at all levels, and our manuals are written in English and then translated into the most common European languages, Italian included.
Our major problem is to find writers who have the following skills/competences:
In Italy it is nearly impossible to find people who can fulfill all three requirements, and the major issue is the English language. Therefore we are using external consultants, whose mother tongue is English, to supervise our drafts.
Now, to answer/comment on your questions:
In this area small manufactures are the most common, and their approach to technical communication consulting is often straightforward and very simple: "I need the working instructions for this machine. Help yourself and write them!... By the way we need them by next week."
This is what I heard from some consultants who provide such services.
I am curious to know whether my opinions match with other Italian TC consultants.
If you have any names/contacts (preferably in Europe, and especially in UK) of/with TC consultants who are interested in short-term contracts in Italy (from a few months up to a couple of years) please inform me. I would appreciate it.
Kind regards
Marcella Lazzari
Marcella.Lazzari@tetrapack.com
Fax: +39 59 898 813
Marcella
You have a valid question, and I am asking Hans Springer to print your letter in full, so that others who may be interested will see it.
I know of someone in Winnipeg, Canada, who has staff doing multi-national translations. I will inform him, although I suspect the distance may be too great.
To our readers: I would like to see your comments regarding Marcella’s letter.
Ron Blicq
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Hello, Hans!
I've received the parcel with TC-Forum #3 (1997) a fortnight ago. By now I have distributed the issues among my colleagues at the Independent University, Bangladesh. They seem to be interested, but nobody yet has expressed a desire to subscribe.
I find the new issue quite interesting, especially the pieces about ISO 9000 and Your new cartoon character. By the way, I suggest to call him (is this creature masculine?) Hanurik.
Here are some comments on the article "To Use Word, or Not to Use Word..." by Ulrich Thiele. Yes, my colleagues and I had an experience in making Microsoft Word 6.0 working on a 25-page brochure with several illustrations. Probably You have seen this brochure - I am speaking about the lecture notes of Screen Computer Courses where I was teaching for several years.
Well, we met the same problems using the 486 DX2-66 PC with 4 MB (and later with 8 MB) RAM. The final decision was to use Word Perfect 6.0, which worked slowly, but never met any difficulties with "insufficient memory" that were so typical for Microsoft Word.
To which I say: if Microsoft is going to proceed in the same manner, we won't get anything better than the slightly renewed Word, overloaded with unusable bells and whistles and consuming horrible amounts of memory. Not that I insist on Microsoft's intentions to move the users to new computers with greater amounts of memory by making the programs that demand much more than they realy need. But it is quite clear that this company doesn't care about the quality of programming, which has nothing to do with "polishing" of the screen appearence, but is about using well-designed algorithms.
Sincerely Yours,
Andrew Shobukhov.
Independent University of Bangladesh
fax: +880 2 88 39 59
ash@iub.agni.com
"transline Deutschland - Übersetzungsdienst für technische Übersetzung"