Technical Communication in China - Is U.S. in the lead?

Have you ever wondered how the field of technical communication is growing in other countries? I stumbled upon an interview conducted by Keith Hoffman, president of the Madison Wisconsin Four Lakes Chapter, who spoke with George Hayhoe, editor of the Technical Communication Journal, about the emergence of technical communications in China and the forces behind the push for technical communicators.

In October 2002, George Hayhoe led a people-to-people delegation, consisting of 15 technical communicators who visited China. The delegation went for a total of 10 days and stayed in three cities which included Shanghai, Beijing, and Guilin. They spent approximately three days in each city and met with the professional delegation. The main goal was to get a general overview of technical communication in China. In the earlier visit to China which was in 1997, another delegation group consisted mostly of academics found that there was a great deal of interest in technical communication in China, but not many universities taught technical communication at that time. And there were not very many people who worked for a company who practiced technical communication.

During the 2002 trip, the delegation found that technical communication is virtually unknown in China. It’s the scientists and engineers who mainly take on the role of writers. They produce reports, journals, and books, and the science writers are more or less called journalists, who write for the general public, but there is nobody really who writes user documentation for software. To these people, this side of our profession is relatively unknown. One of the questions that Keith Hoffman brought up was – Do you see this changing in the near future? Hayhoe said that China is beginning to change, and that this is becoming more common for the Chinese companies to recognize the need for user documentation as they begin to market their products in the West. It will be a while for companies to recognize the need for technical communicators until they see the value in the field. The main problem is that there are not enough native English speakers who know the Chinese language to be able to do translations successfully. Technical communication may very well be outsourced to the U.S.

The most recent trip to China (2008) was led by Linda Oestreich, an STC Fellow and Delegation leader. Linda and her team of 15 technical communicators visited the same three cities as George Hayhoe in 2002, but they also visited the Peking University in Beijing. After hearing presentations from University professors and graduate students, they concluded that Chinese companies use a lot of visual communication. The Chinese believe that their approach to technical communication needs to be more visual because of the language difficulty and different literacy levels amongst the Chinese people.
In China, the top requirement for communication is accessibility, which means making content comprehensible to a wide audience. What’s interesting is that they say that the content must be designed to:
• Entertain
• Inform
• Create interest
• Be usable
Notice how “entertain” is at the top of the list. The Chinese audience is more visually oriented and those from the West are more text oriented. Do you agree?
The thing that was most interesting to me was a quote made by Lai Mao-Sheng, a professor at Peking University, who said “We have two very different ideas about technical communication. In China, technical communication is more about communicating with the people. In U.S., technical communication is about products in technology and business.