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Die LSP.net GmbH, Spezialanbieter von Branchenlösungen und Qualitätsmanagement für die Sprachenindustrie, gibt den Produktionsstart von OTM 3.0 bekannt. LSP.net hat in der Version 3.0 wesentliche funktionale Erweiterungen der Online-Projektsteuerungsplattform für Sprachdienstleister umgesetzt. LSP.net-Geschäftsführer Ulrich Scheffler erläutert dazu: „Mit der neuen Version können unsere Lizenznehmer die Projekt-Kommunikation mit ihren Kunden individuell und in beliebigen Sprachen gestalten. Zudem [...]

This week I attended the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve already written some posts about most of the sessions I attended. This post is a wrapup, with links to those posts and some general information about the conference.

First of all, a very big thank you and warm congratulations to the conference organisers. This was my first time at a TCANZ conference, and I loved the people, the information-rich sessions and the venue. It struck me again and again how much care the organisers took of the speakers and of the delegates. As a speaker myself, it was wonderful to be invited so charmingly and to be welcomed into New Zealand so heartily. Thank you Emily, Margery, Steve, Roy, Luke, Emma, MaryAnne, Sarah and everyone else involved in creating such a great event. And thank you to Emma too for the scintillating, tantalising introductions to each speaker!

The sessions

There were about 60 delegates at the conference, and 14 sessions spread over 2 days. Nine of the sessions were presentations by invited speakers, on the topic of intranet solutions. There were also the introductory session, three product presentations and the speaker forum.

I’ve written posts about most of the sessions I attended. There were a few where I just sat back and listened rather than taking notes. Here are links to my summary posts:

• Conference introduction and welcome, by Lynda Harris
• Metadata: Key to a successful intranet, by Ann Rockley
• Building a great intranet, by Rachael Fogarty
• Presentation of Adobe Corporation products, by Ankur Jain
• Simple design choices for maximum usability, by Patrick Hofmann
• Author-it Corporation presentation, by Matt Armstrong
• Tools for collaboration, management, and delivery of information, by Rowdy Bristol
• Intranet publishing with Drupal, by Chris Daish and Matthew Hunt
• Confluence wiki as an intranet, by Sarah Maddox (this was my presentation)
• Video killed the redundant writer, by Grant Mackenzie

New friends, chit-chat and learning

It’s all about meeting people. Along the way, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Here are some pictures of the conference dinner on Thursday night. The food was excellent and the company was outstanding!

(Click the images to see a larger picture.)

TCANZ 2010

TCANZ 2010

TCANZ 2010

The speaker forum

The very last session was the speaker forum. It was a fun, raucous, thought-provoking and above all terrifying end to the conference.

MaryAnne picked 6 speakers as her victims. I was lucky enough to be one of them. She then took some scraps of paper, wrote the beginnings of some sentences on them, and put them into a cup. Each of us had to draw a scrap of paper from the cup, read the words on the paper and continue speaking. Instantly, with no preparation, and for about five minutes!

The phrase I drew was:

If technical communicators ruled the world, I would take on…

Imagine how you’d continue speaking on that topic, in front of an audience of 60!

Actually, we all acquitted ourselves fairly well. The audience chipped in, lively debates arose, and chickens somehow featured prominently. Well done, MaryAnne, it was fun and a great way to close the conference.

Finally

Heh, I’ve learned at last how to pronounce “TCANZ”. It’s “T-Canz”, not “T-C-A-N-Z”. Seriously though, this is a conference well worth attending.

As we go into Labor Day weekend in the United States and Canada (Labour Day), we thought it would be interesting to look at the origins of this symbolic end-of-summer holiday.Labor Day has its roots in the workers' movement of the late 1800s and is celebrated on May 1st in many countries around the world. Sometimes called International Workers' Day or May Day, the significance of this date

Nelly Kostadinova, Gründerin und Geschäftsführerin des Kölner Sprachdienstleisters Lingua-World, wurde am 24.08.2010 bei der Verleihung der 6. VICTRESS Awards mit dem „Role Model Award“ ausgezeichnet. TV-Moderatorin Tanja Bülter hielt im Berliner Admiralspalast eine bewegende Laudatio auf die Gewinnerin des Role Model Award Nelly Kostadinova. Selbst gerührt von der Geschichte der jungen Bulgarin, die vor 20 [...]

This week I attended the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve already written a few posts about the other presentations at the conference. Now it’s the turn of my own session, called “Let’s take a wiki for a spin”. It was all about Confluence wiki as an intranet platform.

I gave a hands-on demo of Confluence wiki, focusing on the features that are great for its use as an intranet. Sprinkled here and there are some tips on how we use Confluence as our own intranet at Atlassian, and some ideas on how to get employees enthusiastic about using the intranet and how to ensure they feel a sense of ownership of the intranet.

Downloading the presentation

If you like, you can download a copy of the slides in PDF form. They may be useful, even though the presentation was a hands-on demo. I’ve put a lot of information and references into the speaker’s notes too.

• Download the slides in PDF form (1,791 KB): Let’s take a wiki for a spin (slides only)
• Download the slides with notes in PDF form (7,304 KB): Let’s take a wiki for a spin (slides with notes)

A summary of what’s in it

The presentation covers these areas of using Confluence wiki as an intranet:

• Introduction to Confluence wiki.
• Creating a space. In the session, we created the technical communication space, where members of the tech comms team can share their procedures, news and other information. We customised the space home page and looked at various ways of structuring the content of the space.
• Customising the dashboard. We looked at the default dashboard and tried out two ways of customising it. We talked about the advantages of letting all employees change the welcome message on the dashboard and contribute in other ways to the content, keeping it fresh and interesting.
• Publishing a blog post. We wrote a blog post and used the gallery macro to produce a pretty display of pictures. We discussed the idea of making new starters write a blog post on their very first day, and how well that works to get them using the intranet and to introduce them to the company.
• Helping other teams with their spaces. We looked at some of the more technical aspects of content creation, and how technical communicators can help the organisation get the most out of its intranet wiki.
• Staying on top of the news. How can you keep up with what’s happening in the organisation and yet avoid being swamped by the news? We looked at RSS feeds: What they are, how to build them and how to read them. Then we examined the email notifications that the wiki can send, and how you can tailor it to send just what you want to know: Watching a space, watching a page, following people and setting your notification options.
• Taking your own wiki for a spin. It’s surprisingly easy to download and install a wiki and run it on your laptop or desktop PC, just as I was doing for the presentation. The slides contain some pointers to getting hold of Confluence. Other wikis are fairly easy to try out too.

Let me know if you download the slides and what you think of them.

This week I attended the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Grant Mackenzie gave an awesome presentation entitled, “Video killed the redundant writer”. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Grant. Any mistakes are mine.

Grant has a great speaking style: relaxed, confident and with a light touch of humour. He gave his presentation on an iPad, which was interesting in itself. All went without a hitch. He asked us to put our pens down, put our brains in neutral, sit back and enjoy the ride. As his was the last session on a Friday afternoon, these instructions evoked a relieved sigh from the audience.

Here’s a neat quote from Grant:

Computer systems are basically binary code. Technical communicators are the final translators of what starts out as binary code.

It’s all about video

People in the coming generation don’t read manuals. They watch videos and source their information from the World Wide Web.

Websites

Grant suggested some websites to visit, for examples of interesting and good “how to” videos.

• Go to Howcast.com to see some great “how to” videos. It’s certainly an eclectic selection. Examples that Grant mentioned: How to have a shower; how to use a banana in seven unexpected ways; how to tell your parents you are unexpectedly pregnant.
• Go to CommonCraft.com and watch the explanation of augmented reality.
• Try the videos on ExcelTeacher.com.
• Screencast.com is a free hosting site from TechSmith. You can also embed the content from the hosting site onto your blog.

What makes an effective video?

Grant showed a number of short videos during his presentation, giving a convincing demonstration of how effective videos can be.

Videos must be compelling, to keep the viewers watching. What makes a good video? It must be:

• Short
• Relevant
• Pacy
• Genuine
• Findable
• Distinctive.

See the video from MsAppleUser: How to add right click on a Mac. This video satisfies most of the above requirements, Grant says.

Optional positives:

• Humour – but this can be risky.
• Show your face. See the video on how to use a web cam with Jing Pro. It drew laughs from the audience, and kept us engrossed.

What is a video?

Videos consist of containers and codecs. A container contains the codec. A codec contains the compressor and decompressor. The compressor reduces the file size for storage.

The people who watch the video need the same codec as the person who created the video.

There’s a link between video containers and file types. The name of the container and the file type are often the same. So, for most purposes, you can use the names interchangeably.

Grant’s tip: Just use MP4s.

Audio

Take care with the audio part of your video.

• Many viewers are hard of hearing. Make sure that you record at high volume. Set your microphone setting to 100% before you do any recording.
• Buy a high-quality microphone, the best that you can afford. Best is one that plugs into a USB port.

Tools

Grant recommends these your screencast, capture and edit tools :

• Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.
• Adobe Captivate 5.
• Madcap Mimic.
• Camtasia Studio 7. This is the one Grant uses. He recommends it if you don’t specifically want one of the above three to integrate with Microsoft, Adobe or Madcap products.
• Jing Pro. This one gets an honourable mention, because Grant loves it. It’s the best starter option. The Jing training videos are very cute! Note that you can’t edit anything in Jing.

Your video library

Plan the library in the same way as you would any documentation library.

How do people find content that is in a video?

• Try the VideoSurf add-on for Firefox. It shows stills of what’s in the video. You can click the link and go straight to the scene.
• You can create an interactive table of contents for the video, using tools such as Camtasia or Captivate.
• If you create a video from PowerPoint using Camtasia or Captivate, then the tool will automatically create a table of contents from the slide titles.

The wonders of PowerPoint

Grant says that PowerPoint is your friend, where videos are concerned. You can create a video using a screencast from PowerPoint. There are some great PowerPoint plugins. One is the Camtasia plugin, which Grant demonstrated during the session.

You can also just set PowerPoint to play, and record the slideshow with Jing.

PowerPoint gives your videos a consistent look and feel.

Consistency

A consistent look and feel is comforting for the viewers. If your videos have a consistency in the start and finish, your viewers will know they’re in the right place and will feel ready to learn.

Good examples are in the videos at TechSmith.com

Pros and cons of YouTube

Pros: It’s free. Videos are searchable and findable. Viewers watching your videos are using their own bandwidth. Anyone who has a computer can watch a YouTube video.

Cons: Some employers block their employees from using YouTube. YouTube uses its own compression algorithms, which can results in loss of quality.

Summing it up

In closing, Grant wanted us just to remember just 3 things:

• Turn your audio up to 100%.
• Make short videos.
• PowerPoint is your friend.

My conclusion

This was a really great presentation, full of humour and information. Thank you Grant!

I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Chris Daish and Matthew Hunt presented a session on “intranet publishing with Drupal, an open-source content management system”. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Chris and Matthew. Any mistakes are mine.

The session was about Drupal and its use as an intranet. Drupal is a modular, open-source content management framework.

It’s an enormously versatile tool. Chris compared it to a Swiss army knife. When you implement a system on Drupal, you choose just the modules you need.

Looking at CMSes in general, at one end of the spectrum you have huge, complex, expensive CMSes. At the other end of the spectrum are things that offer really just the promise of a CMS. Drupal sits neatly in the middle. It offers flexibility as well as some useful pre-built parts.

A few stats

Drupal started in 2001, with modest beginnings as a bulletin board. Now there are estimated to be over 7 million sites running Drupal, and about 2000 developers at any one time contributing to the core Drupal software. The Monty Python website is built on Drupal!

It’s a very healthy open-source project and one that Chris can confidently recommend to clients.

Why would you consider Drupal for your intranet?

• It’s open-source.
• You can start small. You don’t need a huge amount of technical expertise to roll out a small Drupal installation to a couple of business units, and learn from there. Then you can expand it as you go.
• It’s a child of the social networking era. A lot of the features built into Drupal are about social networking and knowledge sharing. It’s a really good fit for organisations that want to share information via an intranet.
• It offers excellent taxonomy support, via controlled vocabularies, tagging and different ways to classify your content. You can drive your entire intranet using metadata.
• It’s flexible and adaptable, because of its modular nature.
• It’s an active project, so it can react quickly to technological advances and also to your changing business needs.
• There’s a lot of support information out there, including a number of books about Drupal, forums where you can get answers very quickly, and online documentation.

Example sites

Chris showed us some examples of intranets he and the team had put together using Drupal.

• CEO (Chief Electoral Office) – A site for managing elections. This is a very simple site that people in the field can use to do things like order forms, find contact information and read the news and alerts. It was pretty much Drupal out of the box, and does its job very well.
• The next web site was a more active site that encourages people to contribute content to the intranet, by displaying prominent buttons on the front page. It also displays live Twitter feeds and hooks into the IT support system.
• The People’s Times, which is a way for small clubs and societies to generate their own websites. Drupal can spin off these websites very easily and economically.
• A site for an organisation that encourages teaching excellence in the tertiary sector. The site allows teachers to have their own space to share techniques and hold discussions.
• Chris walked us through a case study of the way he used Drupal for the REAA (Real Estate Agents Authority). At that time, the REAA was a new organisation set up to regulate the real estate agent industry. The organisation faced a number of challenges, because there were a number of new processes that they had to put in motion and impose upon the estate agents. They needed tools to support the processes and call centre, and to get everyone registered by the deadline. Chris used Drupal to build a number of systems for REAA, including a knowledge base and an intranet.

How to get your Drupal site going quickly

Now Matt took over, to look at the shortcuts you can take to kick start your own Drupal installation.

• Open Atrium is a pre-configured installation of Drupal, tailored to act as an intranet. It includes blogs, calendar, a Twitter-like sharing mechanism, areas for specific groups and a project tracker. You can get a site up and running very quickly. Just a few hours, and you’re on a roll. Open Atrium was originally developed for the World Bank, and is now available to all.
• Drupal Commons provides an installation profile based on social media. It creates a massively social site where you can create your own networks. It’s geared towards Facebook, LinkedIn and commercial products like Jive.

More about core Drupal features

Matt gave us more information about the core Drupal features that come out of the box.

• Basic search, plus the faceted search add-on that ties in with your taxonomies. The built-in Drupal search does not index attached files or multiple sites. The faceted search includes these abilities too.
• Workflow. Drupal offers rules and workflow. You can define your specific workflow, such as the states, the affected content types, and the user roles that are able to perform each step.
• Taxonomies. You can set up controlled vocabularies, keywords, hierarchical taxonomies.
• RSS feeds. You can build feeds from your content, using taxonomy terms or your front page, for example. You can also integrate external feeds, to create content, users, taxonomy terms. For example, your Active Directory server can send you a feed that you use to create users on Drupal.
• Integration. The Drupal framework can integrate with various systems such as document conversion from Microsoft Word (via Docvert, a freely available conversion via Open Office). Drupal will also integrate with other content management systems like Alfresco, KnowledgeTree and Nuxeo.

My impressions

Drupal is a very solid tool indeed. I haven’t seen much about it before, so I was delighted to have this useful introduction. Thank you Chris and Matthew!

“Die Vorstellung, Sprache könne das Denken prägen, galt lange als nicht überprüfbar und noch häufiger einfach als falsch. Philosophen, Anthropologen, Linguisten und Psychologen haben sich mit dem Thema beschäftigt. Doch obwohl sie viel Beachtung fanden, wurden solche Fragen bis vor sehr kurzer Zeit kaum empirisch untersucht.” So beginnt ein Artikel von Lera Boroditsky, Assistenzprofessorin für Psychologie, Neurowissenschaften [...]

I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Rowdy Bristol gave a session on “tools for enabling collaboration, management, and delivery of information on the web”. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Rowdy. Any mistakes are mine.

Rowdy started with a hilarious sequence of slides outlining the problems that “Simon” encountered when he started as a technical writer at an organisation, and the quest for tools that “Simple Simon” would find easy to use.

These are the tools that Rowdy covered in this presentation. They are the tools that he chose for their simplicity, and that he and his team currently use at Gemcom:

• Microsoft SharePoint – Caters for the communication needs of all employees. Supported by IT. It forces you to tag all content, and uses the tags to present the information in nicely sorted lists. Randy and his team use it as the delivery tool for training, and to host information like the documentation tasks in progress.
• MadCap Feedback Server – Rowdy designated this the best thing since sliced bread, the single best collaboration management and delivery tool. Rowdy uses it to communicate with internal and external SMEs and stakeholders, prototype new ideas and get feedback and usability information. Next year they plan to set it up to receive comments from users out in the field as well. Management is very excited about this project. Feedback Server also gives you an analysis of search results, so that you can see what people are searching for.
• Seapine Surround SCM – Offers content management, source control and version control. This is a very simple piece of software to use. The support staff are very good too. You can check files out, work on them, check them in, and set up workflows to prompt other people to review the work. You can link to issues in TestTrack (see below).
• Seapine TestTrack Pro – For issue tracking and your agile backlog. The team uses it to track requests for improvements to the documentation. The developers use the agile methodology. The backlog is an invaluable tool for interacting with product managers to determine what’s important for the next release.
• MadCap Flare – For information management. Rowdy chose Flare after evaluating a number of other tools. Usability-wise, Flare is very simple.
• DITA – For information management. Rowdy has tweaked it a bit, using different topic types from the standard task, concept and reference. Very simple to tweak.
• Google Analytics – Usage statistics for online content. This is just fabulous for getting information about your users.
• The combined set of tools to schedule tasks and run batch files to build the documentation system daily, making it available on the feedback server daily. Now the writers just need to check out the content, modify it and check it back in. Then it is built overnight. They can also trigger an instant build of part of the documentation if necessary.

During the rest of the presentation, we saw the tools in action. Thank you Rowdy for an interesting display of the documentation authoring and publishing system at work.

by Irv Boichuk

I was browsing through a long list of contract opportunities for technical writers on the Internet, when I spotted one from a manufacturing company looking for a documentation specialist. It stated that the perfect candidate would have "a working knowledge of TQC, TQM, ISO, QS9000, Kaizen, Gemba, and Hoshin." If you read between the words, it was obvious that the company was desperately seeking a quality management program in their operations, but had no idea what they wanted!

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I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Matt Armstrong from Author-it gave a good, simple demo of Author-it Assist and an introduction to Author-it Aspect. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Matt. Any mistakes are mine.

Author-it Assist sounds very interesting. It can contextually link any application to any content. It works on Windows desktop applications as well as web applications.

It is performance support software (from Sarah: similar to guided help, from my understanding). It works with all enterprise IT applications, and lets you push multiple topics to the user’s desktop.

As a the help author, you select the relevant bit of the application (such as a frame or other UI element) then drag and drop the URL onto the application, to indicate that it constitutes the help for that specific screen or UI element. Your content can be delivered from any source: HTML, Word, PDF, etc. Anything that you can display in a browser.

The user sees an “Assist me” tab. When they click it and select a topic, Assist shows a side panel displaying the relevant content. This is the content that the author has marked as relevant.

Assist hooks into the UI elements of the page. It has a fuzzy logic to protect it from UI changes as much as possible.

It’s also available as a set of SDKs. You can download a free copy of the API.

Author-it Aspect is the tool that knows who you are. Based on who you are, it will dynamically filter the information sent to you, including the search information. For example, it can choose the content in the correct language for a particular user. I didn’t get as good an idea of what this one can do, but it’s worth going to the Author-it website to read up on it.

Thank you Matt for a great insight into two tools in the Author-it suite.

I’m attending the TCANZ Conference 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Patrick Hofmann gave a rousing presentation on “simple design choices for maximum usability”. These are the notes I took during the session. All credit goes to Patrick. Any mistakes are mine.

Emma introduced Patrick as “a man of few words”. He’s given many technical communicators valuable insights into visual information design. His talk today was no exception.

Patrick’s presentation focused on the key problems facing graphic design or visual design, and the simple design choices to live by.

The problems:

• Graphic design is given too low a priority. As a result, we sometimes include pictures into our products for the wrong reasons: Just for decoration, or because it’s expected. We include a picture even if it’s totally irrelevant. The experience may even end up being traumatic for the user. Note from Sarah: To fully appreciate the last sentence, you need to understand Patrick’s unique presentation style.
• There are too many different formats of graphics. We try to re-use the same graphics across different formats. We try to streamline our own processes, not the users’.
• We create meaningless graphics. Too often, they are there just for decoration, or with no well-defined purpose.

Patrick showed us some common responses of users during usability tests, and some ways to solve the problems.

The solutions:

• To build a meaningful graphic, ask yourself, “What are the main messages of this graphic, and what do I need to include or exclude to convey this meaning?”
• Verbalise what you see. Test the design by talking yourself through every element of the design. What does each element tell you? Does the picture get in the way of the actual message? Patrick showed some examples of pictures, and verbalised each object: “tree, tree, tree…” (in a map of a park where you were trying to find the paths) or “ventilation hole, ventilation hole, ventilation hole…” (in a diagram attempting to show how to put a lid back on a computer). From Sarah: I think this is a very cool idea. The verbalisation trick is very good at picking out the unnecessary detail in a diagram.
• Do the blur test. Squint, to obscure everything, and see what jumps out at you. You can do the blur test by fuzzing the image in an image tool too.
• Add some contrast.
• Get the text size and spacing right.
• Follow the workflow that the user needs to follow. Solve the oft-voiced complaint from users, “My eyes are all over the place.”
• Reduce the level of detail. Solve the complaints, “Too much jumps out at me” and “It’s too busy”.

Design choices depend on four elements, the “CRAP” elements. You should consider each of them in your page, and decide whether you’re using them to work for you or against you:

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Patrick showed us some websites that used the above elements effectively and some that use them less effectively. Then he went into detail about specific design techniques that we can use to make the best use of the above four elements.

Here are just a few of the tips I picked up:

• You can align textual elements with parts of a picture. For example, the human eye is drawn to an eye or a mouth in a picture. So you could align your blocks of text with the eye or the mouth in a picture on the same page.
• When designing icons, make sure people can easily distinguish one from another. The best way is to have different silhouettes. Try to stick to a single shape, rather than two or more shapes in the same icon.
• Remove unnecessary lines, such as the borders of tables or columns. The human eye is drawn to lines, and this can detract from the actual information on the page.
• One trick that often works well, is to make the primary calls to action (buttons or links) the biggest things on the page. This really improves usability and leads to lots of good feedback from users.

Finally, evaluate your designs simply and often.

Thank you Patrick for a fun and information-packed session. As Emma quipped, “I took lots of notes, and they’re full of CRAP!”

by Deborah S. Ray

Although many potential employers do look to match an applicant's skills, experience, and knowledge to the job they're filling, they are really looking for one basic thing: Can--and will--this person do the job that they need done? With that in mind, your goal is not only to showcase your relevant skills, knowledge, and experience, but to also convey that you're the "will do" person they need.

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by Deborah S. Ray

Question: I just got back from a job interview. I'm interested in the position, and they seemed pretty enthusiastic about my experience and qualifications. Now what? Should I send a follow up thank you letter? If so, should I send a business letter, email message, or hand-written card? And, what should I say?

Good thinking! In general, you should indeed consider sending thank you letters after job interviews, as doing so can offer some specific benefits:

• It can help you get the attention of potential employers.

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by Doug Isenberg
Attorney at Law
Editor and Publisher, GigaLaw.com

Question: We want to use parts of another company's documentation to supplement/support our product's documentation.

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By Geoff Hart

Much though I love my computer, I'm aware of its drawbacks. One serious problem is the risk of so-called "repetitive-stress injury" (RSI)--simplistically, any injury that results from overuse of a body part without giving it time to recover. In fact, "overuse injury" is probably a more immediately obvious term, and given how much time many of us spend using computers, overuse is indeed a risk.

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by Deborah S. Ray

Searching for a job is hard work, no doubt, and it often isn't as simple as sending out a general resume and strolling through an interview process. Instead, it's often a multi-phase process that takes time and effort: You update your resume. You craft a letter of application. You select samples from past projects that best showcase relevant skills. You then go to the interview and show your stuff. That's a lot of work--even for people who are practiced in the job search process.

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by Deborah S. Ray

Question: I'm just getting started in technical writing and am getting ready to start job hunting. I have experience working on a number of projects; however, I don't have any project that I can call my "own" or a collection of projects that I could call a portfolio. How can I overcome this lack of portfolio material when interviewing for jobs?

Okay, so you don't have a project that's all your own. Or, maybe you don't have many completed projects to show a prospective employer.

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We ran across an interesting article the other day about creating translation-ready software help. The author, Lorraine Kupka of NorthCoast Writers, Inc., wrote the article for the WritersUA.com blog. In it, Ms. Kupka lists ten (actually eleven) best practices for creating localization-friendly software help content.Many of the best practices the article lists also apply nicely to other types of