Technical Communication Experience in China - A firsthand account

大家好! I spent all of 2008 living and working in Shanghai, the most populous city in the world's most populous country. Adapting to a different culture and a different language was a fun and exciting challenge. I will be sharing about my experiences in China, both work-related and non-work related. In addition to showing you some of my travel photos, I'll talk about life in the Shanghai office, technical writing as a profession in China, the challenges of teaching non-native English speakers to write clear and precise English, and strategies for communicating with co-workers who are asleep while you're awake. I'll also discuss the tools and technologies we use in Austin that we have transplanted to the Shanghai office.

Please feel free to come with questions. I'd love to discuss anything related to Shanghai, China, Chinese culture, and so on. What do you want to know?

In addition to my blog mentioned below, my co-worker in China Susan Wu maintains an excellent blog at www.shanghaitechwriter.com. I encourage you to check that out if you haven't done so already.

谢谢, and I look forward to seeing you there!

About the Speaker

Ryan Pollack is a staff technical writer at National Instruments in Austin (NI in China is 美国国家仪器公司 which is translated as "American National Instruments Corporation"). For over five years, Ryan has designed and written help files for numerous software products and gained domain expertise in several technical disciplines, such as dynamic system theory and signal processing. In addition to writing, he helps recruit and interview technical writers, make changes to documentation workflow procedures, and create software to automate documentation processes.

Ryan spent 2008 living and working in Shanghai, China. While there, he trained NI's Chinese technical writers to plan, write, and manage documentation projects. He returned to Austin in January 2009 and now supervises the technical writers in the LabVIEW FPGA and Real-Time group while also helping to document these products.

Ryan holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Virginia Tech where he received the 2003 Robert H. Dedman, Jr. Prize for Excellence in Professional Writing. He also holds a Certificate of Spelling Proficiency from his 5th-grade Language Arts teacher. He blogs about his work life at http://lvtechspeak.blogspot.com/ and is the imaginary author of the non-existent book Paragraph or Bulleted List?: A Technical Writer's Guide to Nitpicking.

When

6:00 - 6:30 PM: Networking
6:30 - 7:30 PM: Program
7:45 - 8:00 PM: Commute from Commons to Dinner
8:00 - 9:00 PM: Networking dinner

Where

UT Commons Center - Room 1.138 [Map]

The networking dinner is at

Din Ho Chinese BBQ
8557 Research Blvd
Suite 116
Austin, TX 78758
Tel: (512) 832-8788