Abstract
As trade becomes global and technology allows more of the production of documentation to be done in-house, the difference between the roles of technical writers and translators is narrowing. The assumptions underlying the training of technical translators and notions of quality in technical language do not yet reflect this change. Quality implies standards, and that has recently come to mean international standards. The concluding part of this article will look at some of the implications of the standardization of text conventions for communicating procedures across languages and cultures.