08 October 2011

Why 'technical journalism'?

Above I define 'front-line' documentation as including websites, documents available to customers, prospective customers and other interested persons via websites. Also hardcopy documents distributed at trade shows and the like. Press releases, presskits, brochures, product datasheets, company magazines and in-house publications are all examples, along with technical journalism article for trade publications.

I further define 'technical journalism' as the work that goes into -- or should go into  -- producing such documents.

The translation of technical journalism falls into two categories:
o  'For information' translation of technical journalism articles about a company or its products. In this case the translation customer simply wants to know what a foreign-language article says about the company or its products, or possible a competitors products or some related topic. For the translator this is a straight-forward type of job.
o  'For publication' translation where the translation customer drafts an article promoting the company, its image or its products in its working language then requests translations into one or more target languages for use in the ways already described. At first glance this task sounds very similar to 'for information' translation, but is not. This challenging is the main reason for this blog's existence. Anyone interested should read on and wait for further postings.

ChatGPT, a drafting aid for translation by emulation

On 17 October 2011, I published the first of two posts summarising my general approach to the type of translation/adaptation services I was ...