Someone that I like to follow on Facebook is Mike Rowe. Some of you might know him as the host of the TV program, “Dirty Jobs” and countless voiceovers on other TV programs. He’s an interesting person because publicly, he does his best not to take political sides, and tries to promote the idea that there are a lot of skilled labor jobs out there waiting to be taken, even if they are “dirty jobs”. His big cause is helping people find work, and who can argue with that? He’s the advocate for the regular person doing regular jobs, and living a regular life. He’s incredibly well-spoken, and as such, he’s a compelling speaker (look up his TED talks).
I’m still unpacking and unwinding from all the travel and excitement that’s been going on in the past week from Adobe Day and the 2014 STC Summit. It was a great time, and in some ways, I wish it could’ve been longer. Technical communicators are awesome people!
I was thrilled that I had a great showing of people who came to my first Summit presentation, and I got good feedback from it as well. The presentation initiated a conversation, which is what I wanted to happen, so that was good. I just posted my slides on Slideshare, but in case you are someone who attended and are reading my blog first, the slides are below as well! Since the Prezi link won’t work directly in the slides, I included the link to the Prezi section of the presentation in the appropriate slide, so you could copy and paste to it.
Mea culpa. I admit I’ve been terrible in the last week or two in putting any content here on TechCommGeekMom. It’s been a crazy two weeks. As I write this, I’m in-between sessions at the STC Summit. It’s been a non-stop whirlwind since I arrived here in Phoenix, to say the least. I’m absorbing a lot of information, seeing my tech comm friends, and making new tech comm friends.
I have my first STC Summit presentation tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, and I’m a little nervous, but I’ve given the talk a few times, so it’s not like I don’t know the material. Still, I need to put it all on my flash drive, and I just realized today that part of my presentation is a Prezi presentation that’s embeded, so I have to download that part onto my flash drive as well. And I have the Summit banquet and a last education session to attend before I can get to it! :-S
I will definitely be posting my notes from Adobe Day here soon, and I will also be writing up an article for the STC Notebook which I’ll post here as well to review my time here at the STC Summit. As a second-time attendee and a first-time speaker, the feel of this year’s Summit is different for me than last year’s Summit, so you’ll have to stay tuned for that.
My husband and I had a rare date night last weekend to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary, and we celebrated by going to Philadelphia to see British comedian Eddie Izzard. I love Eddie Izzard’s style of standup comedy, because he mixes up intellectuality with the absurd, and it works brilliantly. If you don’t believe me, go to YouTube, do a search on him, and watch any of his routines. (Two are at the bottom of this post–read on.)
During the show, he talked about how he’s been learning several languages so he can deliver his routines in several countries. He’s already fluent in English and French, and he recently added German to his list, with Spanish, Russian and Arabic planned for the near future. That’s fairly ambitious for anyone to learn so many languages! However, as he started to use other languages, he’d run into some issue.
He’s retold the story for interviews as well, so here’s how it was described in the Boston Globe, which is better than I could muster:
Performing stand-up in another language isn’t as simple as translating the words. Particular phrases that have certain weight or provoke specific images in English can fall flat in another language. Izzard found this was true in his shows in Berlin. There is a routine in his current show about aging, how when people are young, their bodies are trim and fit, but as adults, “our bodies are like two weasels covered in gravy nailed to the back of a tractor.”
When a joke depends on wordplay like that, it tends to fall flat in translation. When Izzard does a literal German translation of it, his speech is full of spiky consonants. “It took me ages to learn to say that phrase,” he says, “and then I found once I was saying it well, the Germans would just stare at me and go, ‘What?’ There was too much wordplay. So I had to change it to, ‘Our bodies are like two washing machines filled with frogs that have been sat on by elephants.’ ”
Because he had to translate it and make sure it worked, “Force Majeure” is the first of Izzard’s shows to be completely scripted. His brother, linguist Mike Izzard, helped him make the transition into other languages.
He will have no such concerns doing his usual improvising in English. “Certain bits in English I’ve actually sorted out, ‘Well, that actually flows well,’ ” he says. ‘Whereas some bits are designed to be extemporized each night, to be improvised each night.”
What does this have to do with content strategy? It’s a huge part of it–TRANSLATION AND LOCALIZATION. Izzard found that merely translating his material wasn’t enough. It would lose its meaning and impact if translated word-for-word into German. Even during the show I was at, I heard him correcting himself a few times by catching himself using British terminology and switching it to American terminology for better understanding. As the Boston Globe article said, in order to make sure that the show he’s presenting now is fairly standardized, he had to come up with a strategy–in this case, a full script rather than only a mental outline of topics to cover in order to make the content consistent, thus making it easier to translate. By writing a script, he’s single-sourcing his content so his audiences can have a singular experience. But in translation, he realized that localization is a big part of it, whether it’s changing from British phraseology to American phraseology, or changing the story a little so it fits better in the language, as he had to do for German in the example above.
The view from our seats at the Forrest Theater in Philadelphia, PA, 3 May 2014.
As we develop our own content strategy, translation and localization need to be a big consideration, even if you don’t think it will be a concern. It can have a big impact on your message, as Eddie Izzard discovered.
And if you don’t know understand this yet, I think we’ll have to get Mr. Stevens to straighten things out. PANG! See these Izzard videos to understand the power of Mr. Stevens.–see part oneand part two. (Note: NSFW language used, but pretty funny. He did a different variation of the Mr. Stevens song for us to the tune of “America the Beautiful,” which I liked better than the version presented here in part two. Localization for the city where the US declared its independence. 😉 )
Yes, you are reading that correctly. Today, I crossed the 20,000 all-time hits mark on my blog. And no, it wasn’t my husband going to my page and hitting the refresh key several times either. (I made sure to tell him not to do that!) I’m thrilled!
I still realize this is small potatoes compared to many tech comm blogs out there. I think I would’ve hit this mark earlier if this past February hadn’t been so slow and bogged down from everyone dealing with the worst winter in recent memory. Nonetheless, I’m finally here in the 20K club!
Whenever I get to this point, I always feel like someone who just won an award on one of those shows like the Academy Awards, the BAFTAs, the Grammys, etc. I want to thank everyone who has supported me so far with my little blog, and have encouraged me to keep going with it. I will always think of this blog as a work-in-progress. Hopefully, it will grow not only with more readers, but that I grow in the process, and the quality of the content grows as well. I honestly appreciate my readers!
Someone that I like to follow on Facebook is Mike Rowe. Some of you might know him as the host of the TV program, “Dirty Jobs” and countless voiceovers on other TV programs. He’s an interesting person because publicly, he does his best not to take political sides, and tries to promote the idea that there are a lot of skilled labor jobs out there waiting to be taken, even if they are “dirty jobs”. His big cause is helping people find work, and who can argue with that? He’s the advocate for the regular person doing regular jobs, and living a regular life. He’s incredibly well-spoken, and as such, he’s a compelling speaker (look up his TED talks).
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