Based on a case study of a global training team, this article focuses on an important ability for professional communicators: collaborating with translators. The study confirms the value of approaching translation as a collaborative recreation rather than mere information transfer and suggests the need to integrate translation with localization and to develop team rapport. Relevant abilities include understanding cultural and professional context, using bicultural vision, and building team relationships. Pursuit of these abilities should draw from translation studies and intercultural communication literature and be informed by diverse rhetorical traditions. Global educational and research partnerships are an ideal way to pursue these goals. Such collaboration can improve research methodology and challenge culturally based assumptions about translation-related communication roles and competencies.

This book explains the paper and electronic portfolio-building process, using the portfolio for job seeking, and relevant legal and ethical issues. Included in its nine chapters are the following topics: an overview of the importance of portfolios, their various types and formats, and strategies to organize a portfolio; creating a personal identity; the content, design, and structure of portfolios; revising and improving portfolio quality; representing skills and expertise in electronic portfolios; ethical and legal issues; strategies for getting feedback; and the use of portfolios for job hunting. Each chapter opens with an introduction and closes with a summary of the key ideas. Much of the information is explained in tables and as checklists, making it efficient to find particular information of readers' interest. Another unique feature is that each chapter is relatively independent. This book is recommended for technical and professional communication students and practitioners who seek a practical guide on portfolio creation.

Although the title alludes to communications in general, the emphasis within this book is on speaking, not writing. Eight of the chapters deal specifically with public speaking, one addresses email and memos, and the last two deal with presentation elements, graphs, and PowerPoint. With two chapters emphasizing anxiety, the reader may experience anxiety overload. Control remedies listed include drugs to relieve anxiety. If your profession is highly dependent on oral communication, then this book may offer a number of items to help you become a better than average speaker. If, on the other hand, your profession is more aligned with technical writing, or editing communications, then this text offers very little.

Twenty years after the publication of Patricia Sullivan's ldquoBeyond a narrow conception of usability testingrdquo in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, three scholars - all Sullivan's students - reflect on the history and development of usability testing and research. Following Sullivan, this article argues that usability bridges the divide between science and rhetoric and asserts that usability is most effective when it respects the knowledge-making practices of a variety of disciplines. By interrogating trends in usability method, the authors argue for a definition of usability that relies on multiple epistemologies to triangulate knowledge-making. The article opens with a brief history of the development of usability methods and argues that usability requires a balance between empirical observation and rhetoric. Usability interprets human action and is enriched by articulating context and accepting contingency. Usability relies on effective collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders in the design of technology. Ultimately, professional and technical communication scholars are best prepared to coin new knowledge with a long and wide view of usability.

In this paper we present, from an academic perspective, the perceived quality ratings of business and technical communication journals. Through a survey of academic experts, we asked respondents to rate the top overall journals, business communication journals, technical communication journals, and the top journals from a technology perspective. In addition, we asked respondents to list the journals that they read most frequently. We analyzed the results by breaking down the rankings into world regions and academic departments. The top-three overall journals for all regions are Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Business Communication, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Importantly, differences by world region and academic department type were found in all these rankings. These results can support researchers worldwide by helping them target their publishing efforts to journals that have the best fit with their business and technical communication discipline, world region, and academic home.

This issue represents the end of the first 50 years of publication for the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. Three of the six articles in this anniversary issue were written by researchers who have been named as Landmark Paper Authors.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

This short book about listening is intended for use as either supplemental reading in business and professional communication course, or as the text of a listening module in such courses. The book aims to provide guidance about how to listen, theoretical background of interest to a person engaged in another professional field, and elements of persuasion about the importance of listening as a communication skill.

Our view of ethics in professional and technical communication has evolved, paralleling developments throughout society. Earlier views on ethics and values have grown into a broad perspective of complex gradations with people at many levels affecting eventual practical outcomes. This newer perspective includes not only persons but social forces and organizations. The organizational culture of NASA, for example, was specifically identified by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) as one of the causes of faulty communication leading to a terribly tragic event. The Challenger investigations of 20 years earlier, on the other hand, focused primarily on physical events, secondarily on professional judgments, and only little on the social and cultural context of the disaster. We learn by failures but also by self-examination. As we see how ethics and values impact technical events, we understand that technological progress is ultimately a human endeavor in which reflection and judgment is as important as measurement and observation.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Discipline maturity and, more often, discipline development are recurrent themes in technical and professional communication scholarship. This paper reviews 25 years of the <emphasis emphasistype="smcaps">IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication</emphasis> in terms of how and who creates knowledge. Specifically, we identify methods used by whom in an attempt to explore how the journal has developed complexity. We posit that the journal has evolved from describing practice to positing theory and finally to employing empirical research methods to evaluate theoretical application. </para>

Expectations for a book in its 6th edition are relatively high: it must have more than casual merit to garner continued editions, and this book meets most expectations quite nicely. Structure, content, and presentation combine for an effective text for those practicing technical communication (or pursuing the educational prerequisites for such a career plan). Some of the topics covered include: resources for technical communication; visual communication; workplace literacy; collaboration and ethics; document design; the need for good definitions; description; instructions, procedures, and process explanations; the different types of reports; letters, memos, and email; and career communication (a.k.a. resume writing) and oral presentations. The text is well written and should prove useful to the practicing technical writer, regardless of the particular industry in which he or she is employed. It will be referred to on a regular basis.

This tutorial on how to teach report writing is based on the premise that decision-making is a complex process that derives from both rational and quasi-rational ways of knowing the world. The author defines quasi-rational to include consideration of hunches, intuition, and tacit knowledge often embodied in stories that have meaning to the decision-maker. Thus, report writing can be approached as a systematic evaluation of options available given goals and constraints, but also as an uncovering of the narratives that decision-makers see surrounding their own lives. The tutorial explains a course curriculum structured in three sections with the following goals and strategies: (1) helping students face personal or family decisions through a traditional decision-matrix process that also incorporates elements of rhetorical stasis theory, (2) using big case studies to reveal the interplay between rational and quasi-rational thought in decision-making, and (3) finding case studies in the students' local geographic regions in order to further explore this interplay. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of how the author's students responded to such a course

The rapid evolution of digital products has given birth to a revolution in the way we communicate. As the international audiences for our software, hardware, and portable digital products expand, the amount of time and money that we invest in translating, localising, and internationalising our products for multiple languages or audiences increases dramatically. In doing so, one tactic to reduce the word count and maximise usability is to produce highly graphic information - using pictures in accompaniment with (or in replacement of) words to help communicate our product information or end-user instruction. Although the professional communications industry is only beginning to consider the importance of localising graphic information, it is a fundamentally necessary step in producing effective information, and an important consideration for developers of information products

While a significant amount of attention and interest has been directed to investigate the communicative functions of organizational websites, little research has been done to examine how internal organizational communication shapes organizational website design. This study employs the theory of rhetorical situation to examine the impact of internal organizational communication on website design. Specifically, it has examined a few organizational website design case studies from the perspective of rhetorical situation and has analyzed a case about website design by a Chinese student organization on a US college campus. Both the examination and analysis show that organizations and designers must communicate effectively in the process of identifying and thereafter transforming organizational objectives into effective website features. Both theoretical and practical implications for organizational website design are addressed in the paper

This short paperback book is divided into 14 chapters and 2 exhibits. The book is designed to provide answers to two key questions - First, how do we reduce the number of emails we find in our mailbox each day, and ,second, how do we teach others to present information in the most effective manner? The solution, according to the authors, is simple: bottom line. In simple terms, it means bringing the subject to the front of the e-mail so that the reader finds the answer to the question "Why should I be interested? quickly. The authors develop a number of approaches that are suitable for most e-mail communication. The authors extend the concept to other business writing as well, but they admit there are circumstances that may require different approaches. The takeaway message is a good one for engineers, technical communicators, and managers alike. The book is an excellent addition to one's reading list and the local library's reference shelf.

Unlike experienced collaborators, student teams often attempt to collaborate without effective documentation of meetings. This tendency may be exacerbated by professional writing textbooks, which rarely mention minutes in their chapters on collaboration and provide ineffective examples of meeting minutes that follow a parliamentary style of minutes rather than the action-oriented style that is the norm in most workplace settings. Interviews with three engineering managers are supported by published research in professional communication to show how meeting minutes are essential to projecting a team forward by solidifying consensus and holding individuals accountable for actions. A short exercise designed to teach students how effective minutes function as a management tool is presented along with observational evidence of the exercise's effect on student team practices in both professional writing and computer science team projects

Because English is the lingua franca of world trade, the language of commerce, finance, and economics is characterized by an ever-increasing use of Anglicisms. Polysemic English loan words are particularly problematic in translation, as their meanings do not always match across donor and receptor languages. An Anglicism may, for example, convey a subset of the senses expressed by the same word in English and/or it may convey meanings typically expressed by a synonymous English word. It is no wonder that translator trainees often get into difficulty when having to decide whether and how to translate an English word with an established Anglicism in Italian. This tutorial presents a corpus-based teaching methodology that draws on the data-learning approach devised by Tim Johns and aims to equip translator trainees with a kit of analytical tools for better understanding Anglicisms in cross- and inter-linguistic professional communication so that they can produce accurate and effective translations. After briefly reviewing recent studies of Anglicisms in Italian, I outline the main features of the proposed educational methodology and illustrate how it has been applied to the analysis of the lemma business in the Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) translation classroom.

This brief editorial describes the field of professional communication, comments on its evolution, and then explains how research and findings in corpus linguistics can aid in enriching the field of professional communication even further. Four articles and two tutorials, representative of studies and applications in corpus linguistics, are then presented in a brief preview.

This paper describes the development of the AntConc corpus analysis toolkit, originally designed for use in a technical writing course at Osaka University, Japan, but now adopted in institutions throughout the world as an easy-to-use, freeware, multiplatform alternative to the many commercial concordance programs. First, I will explain how the software was originally tailored to the needs of students in the Osaka writing course and later to a general audience through the requests and feedback from teachers and students around the world. Then, I will give an overview of tools in the most recent version of AntConc and explain their value using examples from the classroom. Finally, I will discuss some of the software's limitations and future developments, and suggest applications in professional communication

Relying on examples taken from the business section of the Corpus of Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence (in preparation), this paper intends to discuss the linguistic means employed to express authority and convey stance in relation to different recipients (peers, superiors, or subordinates) and different subject matters (e.g., legal controversy as opposed to ordinary, routine transactions). In particular, the aim is to present a survey of the positive and negative politeness strategies adopted by encoders of varying status (e.g., bank officials, publishers, but also working-class contractors). After a general outline of the corpus currently being compiled, different cases are discussed, in which hierarchical discourse is observed. Our concluding remarks focus on the implications this type of study may have for sociohistorical linguists on the one hand, and the study of the earliest stages of professional discourse on the other; indeed, the latter aspect may be of considerable interest also for present-day practitioners who may gain insights concerning the pragmatic strategies that have proved to be most successful over time. Similar ways of encoding stance and distance, for example, are still found in present-day formal exchanges, though the focus is probably more on corporate identity, rather than on individual participants.

Corpus studies are revolutionizing the study of language practice, including professional communication, by substituting actual examples of practice for prescriptive intuition. Corpora are often put together by researchers who exert much care in what goes into a corpus. Yet professional communicators also experience corpora as commodities in the marketplace, bundles of "writing models" for sale that cross genres of professional and personal communication. When writers purchase these bundles, what are the latent rhetorical strategies they are purchasing? A corpus study of 728 canned letters across 15 genres taken from a best-selling trade book was undertaken. The texts were tagged for rhetorical features and factor analyzed for latent rhetorical dimensions of proficiency. The study concludes that the latent rhetorical proficiencies brought into evidence are heavily weighted on skills of collecting or raising money. While this study requires replication over a wider sample, it illustrates how corpus approaches can help us rigorously retrieve latent rhetorical skills across a collection of rhetorically diverse texts. It further helps us see how corpus studies allow one to maintain close ties between the avowed standards of communication practice and the close description of the practices themselves

Research on the transition from school to work suggests that students entering the workplace struggle to adapt their writing and speaking to individual audiences. To address this problem, the article presents principles for using problem-based learning to design assignments that teach students to tailor communication to the needs of audiences. The approach focuses not on specific workplace documents but on the higher order workplace practice of effectively connecting documents and presentations to audience needs, and designing communication accordingly. A two-year study of capstone design courses suggests that the approach encourages students to explicitly consider audience needs when composing.