For the first time, students in the new ENGL-455/655 International Technical Writing course, offered by NDSU’s English department, culminated their semester-long collaborative assignment on Dec. 9 with a live videoconference involving 117 students in four countries. It is believed to be the largest and most complex international learning-by-doing project of its kind.
The project revolved around sets of instructions written and designed by the 11 students in the NDSU class. Choosing topics on which they considered themselves experts, the technical writing students first wrote procedures for English-language readers in North America, then conducted usability tests on their documents by recruiting local subjects.
From there, the NDSU writers sent their documents to software engineering students enrolled in a usability-testing course at Vaasa University in Finland. The Vaasa students ran their own usability tests with Finnish subjects accustomed to reading procedural texts in English, then wrote and sent formal test reports, again in English, back to the NDSU students.
In the meantime, the NDSU students took steps to prepare their texts for localization and translation before sending their documents to partners majoring in translation studies. The partners included a class of 37 students at University College Ghent in Belgium, who translated the NDSU students’ instructions from English to Dutch, and two classes of 25 and 36 students, respectively, at the University of Paris–Denis Diderot, who translated the texts from English to French.
Throughout the semester, the partners communicated with each other mainly by e-mail but sometimes also via Facebook and, in at least one case, through a live Skype video connection. The majority of partners didn’t see or hear each other until the synchronous videoconference on Dec. 9.
Because of the difference in time zones, the NDSU students had to rouse themselves early to make the 6 a.m. start, which was 1 p.m. in Ghent and Paris and 2 p.m. in Vaasa. Smiles were visible on all screens as students finally saw and talked with partners they had been corresponding with for many weeks. The one-and-half-hour session ended with a student in Paris offering a trans-Atlantic “high-five” in congratulations, a gesture that was reciprocated on the screens from all four sites.
“I thought the ‘trans-Atlantic high-five’ was humorous and fitting,” said Steven Hammer, an NDSU doctoral student in English enrolled in the course. “That student’s comments prior to that punch line seemed to echo what many students were communicating. He talked about talking to people instead of machines, to make connections and relationships. Taking a course like this, at least in my experience, has put a lot of focus on a writer’s relationship to a text, to a process, to a technology, to a translator.”
“Having the opportunity to get to know and work with students from such different backgrounds was really neat,” said NDSU junior Alyda Hultstrand, an English major in the course. “We ended up being able to work together much better than I actually anticipated, and I felt like we accomplished very good work. I also felt as though our projects were fairly close to real-life scenarios and in that way were invaluable for future reference and having an idea of how things can work, what things can go wrong, what makes communication go more smoothly, etc.”
In separate but simultaneous projects reversing the direction of “text travel,” the NDSU students partnered with a translation class of nine master’s students at Aarhus University in Denmark, and their same partners at University College Ghent, but this time as editors. For this project, the Danish and Belgian students began the process by choosing news articles to translate from Danish and Dutch, respectively, into English.
Because the European students have learned British English as their second language, the NDSU students filled the role of local reviewers in the localization/translation quality-control procedure by editing the translated texts so they were rendered in idiomatic American English. As they did, they explained their recommendations to their partners so the translation students could learn American vocabulary, idioms and connotations.
Last fall’s collaborations were the most recent sponsored by professors belonging to the informal network dubbed The Trans-Atlantic Project and founded in 1999 by NDSU’s Bruce Maylath, professor of English, and Sonia Vandepitte, lecturer of English, University College Ghent. In addition to the universities listed above, the network also has included Italy’s University of Trieste and University of Padua, Austria’s University of Graz, Russia’s Tomsk Polytechnic University and the USA’s University of Wisconsin-Stout.
Previously, collaborations involved only a single project linking only two classes at a time, such as a section of NDSU’s ENGL-321 Writing in the Technical Professions and a translation class in Europe. With its focus on international technical writing, the ENGL-455/655 class experienced the complexity of international workplaces, with multiple documents in multiple languages heading to and from multiple nations.