SDL Author Assistant for Adobe® FrameMaker 9
Takeaways from Webinar on SDL Author Assistant for Adobe® FrameMarker 9
Summary: Reducing translation costs and reducing wordiness in technical documentation. Provides key points from the webinar, “Bring your Style Guide to Life and Create High-Quality Content from within Adobe FrameMaker 9,” featuring Sophie Hurst and Terry Lawlor from SDL, and RJ Jacquez from Adobe. Explains the benefits of using SDL Author Assistant to automate your company’s style guidelines, by running a “style” check of your documents, as easily as you run a spell check today.
I recently participated in the webinar “Bring your Style Guide to Life and Create High-Quality Content from within Adobe FrameMaker 9,” featuring Sophie Hurst and Terry Lawlor from SDL, and RJ Jacquez from Adobe.
The SDL Author Assistant for Adobe® enables enterprise-wide consistency in grammar, style, and terminology and reusability of content. It checks written text for writing style issues that impact the content’s readability and translatability.
This plug-in is available as a free download for FrameMaker 9 customers from SDL Author Assistant for Adobe FrameMaker 9 on Adobe web site).
After RJ Jacquez provided a brief overview of Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2 (see summary), Sophie Hurst and Terry Lawlor explained the benefits of using SDL Author Assistant to automate your company’s style guidelines, by running a “style” check of your documents, as easily as you run a spell check today.
Style rules from The Chicago Manual of Style and Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications, are integrated with SDL Author Assistant, by default. If you want to customize the default styles with your company’s style preferences and product terminology, SDL Author Assistant lets you do that.
Automating a Style Check for Technical Documentation
With these integrated styles, you can automate checking a document for the most common style violations (passive voice, future tense, inconsistent use of compounds, and wordy phrases), before it even goes to translation. In the process, you can automatically replace the wordy expressions and terminology inconsistencies, according to the SDL Author Assistant defaults.
How Much will this Cost to Translate?
After you run the linguistic check, SDL Author Assistant creates an HTML report, showing all issues (for example, spelling variations, cases of wordiness, and use of dangling participles), and then shows you the cost of translation, if you do not revise these issues.
Using Automated Style Rules to Revise Technical Documentation
During the demo, Terry Lawlor showed how easy it is to revise the issues, substituting the style violations with more standardized word choices, based on SDL Author Assistant’s integrated style rules.
Translation companies store all previously translated content in Translation Memory, so the more you deliver concise, consistent content, the more the translation company can reuse content, again lowering your costs.
Downloading SDL Author Assistant for Adobe
FrameMaker 9 Customers: For your free download of SDL Author Assistant for Adobe®, see the Adobe or SDL web site.
Note: I have not used SDL Author Assistant, but I was impressed by the demo. Even if my documents are not going to be translated (today), using this FrameMaker plug-in can only improve the conciseness and consistency of our documentation efforts. Often working as a lone technical writer, I do not always have the benefit of a professional editor or fellow technical communicators, as peer reviewers. SDL Author Assistant could help me better self-edit.
Have any readers here used this plug-in? Do you have any SDL Author Assistant or other translation tips to share?
Photo credit, A30_Tsitika
