Building Translation Awareness in Occasional Authors: A User Case from Japan

We report the early stages of an industrial-academic collaboration to build translation awareness within a global Japanese company where nonprofessional authors are called upon to write ‘global job manuals’ for internal dissemination. Following an analysis of current practice, we devised a document template and simple writing rules which we tested experimentally with two MT systems. Overall, native-speaker judges found that the quality of the Japanese was maintained or improved, while the impact on the raw English translations varied according to MT system. The case study has wider implications for the acceptance of structured authoring by nonprofessional and occasional writers.