. This in no way reflects on the intelligence or education level of the writers, but represents the difficulty of merging technical knowledge with writing skills to produce an acceptable product. It is not unusual for highly educated technicians to produce poor-quality writing because their training and experience have not focused on verbal and written skills. | Related Fields and Growing Trends 131 and this subfield of technical communications should grow rapidly. Machine translation is an exciting employment possibility for translators those people gifted in more than one language and with the ability to write well. You may be more familiar with CAT computer-aided translation. To aid in the usage of CAT companies are approaching translation in stages. First a glossary or vocabulary of the most common technical terms used by that company for foreign translation is drawn up for the translators as well as for other writers. This glossary is entered into the database followed by for example a page of a manual. This is pre-edited and then applied to the glossary. Words in the original piece of work are now transformed by the glossary or glossarized and the piece of writing is returned to the translator for its completion and final editing. Of course this is an oversimplification of the process but it may provide you with some idea of what is meant by CAT and machine translation. This development is by no means foolproof but it does show the direction translation efforts are taking. Systems of oral dictation to the computer also are being developed for translation purposes. Eventually words spoken in one language may be computer processed and translated into another. Computer Documentation Computers are certainly no longer novel but their increased use in every area has presented a challenge for the technical writer to produce clear and usable computer-related documents. Lack of adequate documentation that is the written form of all the available information about a particular computer computer program or set of programs is a major problem in modern industry. Documenta 132 Opportunities in Technical Writing Careers tion in its many forms such as operating instructions troubleshooting and repairs user guides and so forth is essential for management information on systems development and for proper coordination of subsequent .
