Featured TC: Valérie Genet-Guillou
Valérie Genet-Guillou is a technical writer who works for Christchurch-based company Aucom Electronics from her home in Nelson. AuCom designs and manufactures soft starters, motor control centres and medium voltage switchgear.Rhiannon Davies caught up with Valérie by Skype last week.
How long have you been a technical communicator and how did you start out?
I started about 20 years ago at Tait Electronics. I had degrees in communications, and when I first came to New Zealand a friend of mine who worked at Tait knew they needed someone for a translation job. After that, they had translations in other languages - and they realised I felt at ease with many of these - while no-one else wanted to handle the translations.
Later, I went into writing – it so happened that they had a product for the French market, and they didn’t have the manuals, so I got to write the manual in both languages, and they realised “Hey, that’s a pretty cool product we’ve just created!”, and they kept me on.
What are you currently working on?
We’ve got the regular projects that I call the “bread and butter” products, so we’re making updates to those. My colleague is writing our new product, and I’m preparing a document which is keeping in synch with that, so I can prepare the database for the locales and what we’re going to do. I also got a request for something three days ago – we have a big contract signed for the French market, so I’m going to have a whole bunch of custom documents to be translated. We have single sourcing, so we can extrapolate from that, but we will have a whole new field of topics to be translated, so I’ve been preparing those too.
What do you do in a typical day?
Because I work mostly on the translations and I do the writing, I’ve been working mostly on updates. For the translations, the fact that I’m dealing with people all over the world means we have to have a process - we do a lot of reviewing - you’ve got the translator who reviews, the agency also provides a reviewer, and then we have internal reviews, so I run a sanity check as well as checking the lexicons. I also do a lot of preparation, and I document everything that’s causing problems so we can find a way of handling it. I spend a lot of time being the go-between with the translator and the reviewer, and I also do a pre-check of the documents before they go out.
What has been your best success story so far?
When we started on Russian it was really hard. I didn’t understand the reviewer’s comments, the translator, or the arguments, so I spent a lot of time coming in relatively early spending an hour every day learning as much as I could on the grammar in Russian and how it works, and I started understanding the problems better. I was well supported by the company when I explained that the manuals weren’t ready. We deal with medium voltage which is quite dangerous; if you get things wrong, people can die, so I really wanted to make sure things were translated correctly. I realised that we could improve our source database so that similar errors would not happen. I was also drawing from German, where we were resolving the same sort of issue, and because I could read German and I knew the grammar, I could understand it in Russian more, and then we knew how to fix the source to make it work for all of our languages.
If you could give a piece of advice to someone thinking of training to be a technical communicator, what would you tell them?
We hear a lot about plain English - it really pays off, even if you’re not going to translate. You need to have your documentation reviewed, and the simpler you write it, the more concisely, the better. Sometimes you can’t be too concise, you can’t simplify something that’s complex, but you can make it so it’s simpler. And be consistent with your terminology. It’s really, really important in translation, and it’s really important in technical authoring. If you can bring that to your company, that’s such an asset. English changes from one country to another as well, so keeping everything constant and simple is vital.
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