CHAPTER 1

CHANGING TIMES, CHANGING STYLE GUIDES

Jennifer O’Neill

Jennifer O’Neill is a senior technical writer based in Brussels, Belgium. She has worked with technical publications for 17 years. O’Neill has a Master’s degree in science in ergonomics and a background in usability. Prior to working with technical publications, she worked as an ergonomist in the United Kingdom and France evaluating the usability of buildings. It was during that work that O’Neill first became involved with building security and encountered the documentation that accompanies security products. O’Neill currently works for a U.S. multinational corporation that manufactures security products, such as closed-circuit televisions, for a global market. Canadian-born Irish, she speaks English as her mother tongue and is fluent in French. She has worked in three countries: the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium.

CHAPTER SYNOPSIS

Based on the writer’s personal experience, this is a story about change, change that occurred against the backdrop of the global economy, change that rose out of the need for companies to stay fiercely competitive in the global market. As European and American companies went through mergers and acquisitions, publication units were relocated and restructured, and style guides had to be created, re-created, merged, and only to be abandoned. This story illustrates how a group of European technical communicators try to adapt to these changes and produce quality documentation for the global market. However, as various moves and false moves were made, the demands of some regions and markets rose to the top, while the needs and concerns of others fell by the wayside. Debates and discontent broke out, and compromises as well as one-sided decisions were made. Through it all, we learn the challenges faced by European writers trying to produce, on tight budgets, documents for a regional market that operates in 20 languages. We understand their frustration trying to educate American writers and editors on how to write for translation and localization. And, probably most importantly, we are asked to accept the necessity and reality of change.

The times they are a-changing.

—Bob Dylan, 1964

In January 2007, three heating and ventilation manufacturing companies, two located in the United States and one in Europe, merged to create a global company. Their joint product base now included heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) units, boilers, pumps, fans, filters, refrigeration, solar panels as well as more software driven services such as energy management and building automation systems. The merger made sense as all three companies wanted to expand their global reach in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It would help jump-start long-term growth because each company brought business, technology, and market strengths to the table that complemented each other.

The two U.S. companies mainly operated in the North American market, although one had started to expand into Latin America and had small but growing sales offices in Mexico and Brazil. The European company operated across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). From now on, all three companies would be known as Shannon Global Facilities, Inc. (all company and character names used are pseudonyms).

TECHNICAL WRITING TEAMS

The two U.S. companies both had a technical publications department, located, respectively, at their R&D sites in California and Arizona. Collectively they had nine writers, one editor, and two documentation managers.

The California writing team was based in Oakland, California. As a result of the merger, this R&D and administration site was now to become the global headquarters of Shannon Global Facilities, Inc. The writers were managed by Nancy Sherbakov. Her technical publications department had five writers and an editor. Nancy had a long career as a writer and editor, working in several sectors such as telecoms, financial and equipment manufacturing. She had been managing this department for the last five years. Zac Browning managed the Arizona technical publications department. He had built his team over the last seven years, growing it from just two writers attached to engineering to a technical publications department with four writers and himself as the manager.

The European company involved in the merger had four writers located in three countries—France, the Netherlands and Hungary—to accommodate the company’s R&D sites in Maastricht, the Netherlands; Budapest, Hungary; and its headquarters in Lyon, France.

The European writer based in Lyon, France, was Sara Mitchell. She was English and had moved to Paris after graduating in French over 12 years ago. She had joined her current company six years ago from Paris as a senior technical writer. The move to Lyon had initially been a big social change for Sara, but now it was her home. It was the gastronomic capital of France and let her explore her love of cooking. It was also cheaper than Paris to visit restaurants renowned for their cuisine.

Sara’s technical writing colleagues in Maastricht, the Netherlands, had also been moved around. Dirk was Dutch but was born in Surinam. His family returned to the Netherlands when he was nine years old. He lived over the border in Antwerp, Belgium, for a couple of years after graduating in journalism and then in Madrid, Spain, for a few years before moving back to the Netherlands. He had excellent English, was also fluent in German and Spanish and had reasonable French.

The other “Dutch” colleague was Sonia, who had been with the company for two years. Sonia was actually Scottish and had an IT background. She had a wanderlust spirit. So far, she had worked in five countries (England, Germany, Italy, France and now the Netherlands), usually as a contractor. Technical writing as a career gave her the flexibility to move around Europe for work. Sonia was fluent in German, had reasonable Dutch, and had some Italian.

Gabor at the Budapest, Hungary, office was Hungarian and had never lived outside his country. He was a young kid when the Wall fell in 1989 so he had learned English in school but had some knowledge of Russian. He had moved from technical support in the company to become a technical writer three years ago.

The European company had decided several years earlier that they would use U.S. English in all English language communications. So despite their diverse backgrounds, the European writers wrote in U.S. English. Their writings included installation, configuration, and inspection manuals for installers (which averaged around 80 pages) as well as a few end-user guides. The European writers also oversaw the localization of the manuals each had written, so they worked closely with the translation agencies and the sales offices across EMEA.

Now part of the EMEA division of Shannon Global Facilities, the European writers operated in 20 languages across the EMEA region. However, it was too expensive to translate the manuals into all these languages to meet customer needs, so languages were prioritized, depending on the product and its market. The average number of languages in a translation project was 12 (with an upward trend). They were paid for from the central translation budget managed from the Lyon headquarters. The demands of localization meant that the European writers were kept continually alert to the costs of getting their work to market in all the required languages.

PROBLEMS IN U.S. MANUALS

Shortly after the merger, Shannon Global Facilities started their efforts to sell in the EMEA market those products that were previously only available in North America. In May 2007, Sara was told by the EMEA product management team that as part of her tasks she would now also be overseeing the localization of U.S. manuals and energy management and building automation system software for the EMEA market. They told her that the United States had previously only translated a few short manuals, which was done by the Mexican and Brazilian sales offices. The U.S. staff had not yet used the services of a translation agency as their sales offices translated for free. As Europe already had several years’ experience working with many languages, the United States would now also send their work to them to be translated for products sold in EMEA. The EMEA business would pay the cost of these translations.

That same month, Sara started to receive the source files of manuals from the documentation managers in the United States. The manuals varied between 40 and 120 pages and all were done in Microsoft Word. As she began to check the U.S. manuals for potential localization issues, Sara quickly realized that there were three main problems: (1) the manuals lacked global branding; (2) they followed conflicting style guides; and (3) they had not been created with translation in mind.

Although Shannon Global Facilities had by now existed for over five months, the company still didn’t have a single corporate branding identity. Marketing was working on it, but it probably wouldn’t be finalized for at least a few more months. Sara needed to get these manuals out the door in multiple languages as soon as possible. However, she was faced with manuals that had been branded prior to the merger with multiple branding identities. The company names and logos were different from those used in EMEA and had different fonts, cover designs, and colors.

In North America, there were sales teams for each business group (HVAC, renewable energy, and energy management), and each group had its own branding. The...