Global Virtual Teams Create and Translate Technical Documentation: Communication Strategies, Challenges and Recommendations

Yvonne Cleary , Madelyn Flammia , Patricia Minacori (1) , Darina M. Slattery

1 CLILLAC-ARP (EA_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus

Since 2013, students from the University of Limerick (UL), the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Université Paris Diderot (UPD) have collaborated on a documentation and translation assignment in virtual teams. The UL and UCF students, who study technical communication, collaborate to write procedural documents. The UPD students translate the documents into French. A key feature of the project design is the need for collaboration among the document writers and translators throughout the process. This paper provides a theoretical background to the project and describes the assignment that student teams collaborate on. It then offers guidelines for faculty wishing to organize similar projects.

Keywords: translation; technical communication; learning-by-doing; distance learning

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Linguistics

Yvonne Cleary, Madelyn Flammia, Patricia Minacori, Darina M. Slattery. Global Virtual Teams Create and Translate Technical Documentation: Communication Strategies, Challenges and Recommendations. IEEE International conference 2015, Jul 2015, Limerick, Ireland. pp.52-62. ⟨hal-01230064⟩