I'm a Michigan native, and I attended Michigan Technological University (Go youse Huskies!), where I started out as a C.S. major. I decided I didn't like writing program code, and that writing about what the application did was much more satisfying, so I switched to their Scientific and Technical Communications (STC) program. Since 1990, I've worked mainly as a technical writer/documentation specialist at various companies in the Chicago area.
At my current location, I edit all technical publications for our department and manage the localization and translations of documents and software applications. I'm also the resident techno-geek, always looking for tools and utilities and methods that will reduce turnaround time and improve our documentation.
Along with Donna, another writer here at my company and also on this list, we started single-sourcing our user docs in unstructured Frame, breaking the content apart into topical files. Using conditional text and mixing and matching topical files as necessary, we build Quick Ref Guides, User Guides, Programming Guides, and Maintenance Manuals for numerous products from the same source files. It's been quite a learning process for everyone as we've traveled this path, but I've no doubt that our docs are better for it. They are more consistent on content, we can get a doc to production much quicker than before. It's also reduced our translation costs considerably.
I've been an expert in unstructured FrameMaker for many years, and my current project (in my free time - hah!) is to master Structured Frame, XML, and DITA so we can take our docs to the next level. With our company translating into 29 languages for some docs, it's clear that we will need to get our content into a CMS, and to do that, we need to strongly look at XML.
Oh, yeah... I'm also a mom of three young kids, involved in PTO, and scouting (boy and girl) is a big part of our family lives. My husband is a scout leader, and I help out with all of our kids troops/dens/packs as needed. I've put my tech writing skills to work for both the PTO and for scouting.
Cheers!
Carla M.
Translation Coordinator/Editor
Zebra Technologies Corp.
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=6884326
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