Making Sense of Technical Content

What is technical content?

If you’ve assembled a piece of furniture, browsed through your new car’s user manual, visited the help section of a website or tried to strip down and repair an airliner, you’ve engaged with technical content. It forms a crucial role in the creation, deployment and upkeep of any product, software application, sophisticated platform or complex machinery across all industries, from finance to aerospace to the consumer market. Lionbridge is an experienced partner for all technical content production, translation and localization.

We’ve built long-standing relationships with both private industry and government clients across energy, telecommunications, consumer products, financial, automotive, aerospace, maritime, and defense industries. Lionbridge’s fully managed content lifecycle solutions enable you to connect with your customers through quality content and a consistent brand voice.

“We don’t just work with our customers to produce a piece of content or documentation in isolation,” said Phil Kennedy, Director of GES Operations in Europe for Lionbridge. “We collaborate and engage with them on their content ecosystem and strategies in an intelligent service methodology, delivering as one seamless process.”

Below, learn how Lionbridge experts create, translate and deliver exceptional content across industries and media types.

#1 Marketing and Sales: Providing an Exceptional Customer Experience

Technical content and customer experience go hand-in-hand, since consumers expect technical content to be easily accessible and available across multiple platforms. Although technical documentation frequently describes complicated processes, it needs to be clear enough to speak to the end user. Marketing experts rely on technical documentation to aid them in creating campaigns, whitepapers, solution briefs, multimedia and other content. By providing an exceptional customer experience through outstanding technical documentation, an organization can secure future sales and create effective marketing campaigns. Lionbridge experts create cutting-edge technical documentation, using 3D animation and a multimedia approach to bring your documentation to life.

See it in action:

A leading aircraft manufacturer wanted to enhance the user experience for their technical manuals and improve the usability of the documentation. The solution Lionbridge delivered involved creating new text procedurals, color illustrations and 3D animated procedures to improve the clarity and accessibility of its technical manuals. The client received positive feedback from surveys and customers, prompting them to develop more new programs. The innovative 3D documentation for complex procedures was particularly well-received.

#2 Engineering: A Digital Future

Technical documentation is the backbone of many industries, from aerospace to maritime to defense, and beyond. Engineers rely on up-to-date technical content to aid them in maintenance and repairs on sophisticated platforms, systems and machinery. As engineers become more digitally savvy, they increasingly rely on digital technical content, using multimedia, 3D procedures and video content. AI has emerged as a key indicator of the future of engineering, allowing many more tasks to be done remotely on autonomous vehicles, submersibles and surface ships.

See it in action:

Lionbridge is proud to deliver full suites of manuals and thousands of pages of documentation for the differing levels of system maintenance for our defense and aerospace clients. We work directly with manufacturers, using design, build and digital data to create highly complex and regulated engineering manuals, all around the world.

#3 End Users: Making Installation Instructions Simple

Some of the most frequent consumers of technical content are end users who receive quick start guides or instructions on how to set up a product, as well as interacting daily with websites and online articles. Since end users may not have specialized training in a product, technical documentation needs to be clear, accessible and user-friendly. Lionbridge provides a suite of technical documentation to help both end users and support services. This includes documentation tailored for online and digital environments, encompassing consumer-oriented software, animations, AR, VR and multimedia formats.

See it in action:

We create integrated parts catalogues for a leading power tool manufacturer, which visually illustrates each part of a tool. These guides are used both by consumers, who may want to buy a spare component and fix their machine themselves, and by service technicians who need to be able to buy replacement parts and install them, efficiently returning the machines to service.

#4 Developers: Setting a Standard

Technical documentation goes far beyond printed material for physical systems and plays a key role in software development. Lionbridge supports clients with the creation of API documentation, ensuring clarity and high-quality content for users and developers. Lionbridge collaborates and consults with our clients to improve processes, standards and specifications, targeting data reuse, efficiency gains, delivering a class leading product.

See it in action:

A large financial institution had concerns with the quality and usability of their technical documentation for APIs (application programming interface), which did not provide enough information for the end user. Lionbridge worked with the institution to create a standardized process and style for API documentation across the customer’s business units, creating a continuous theme and consistency through that content. The improved API documentation which Lionbridge created enabled software developers to choose the correct API for their system and understand how to code the API into their software. Our client has since expanded the project to include more internal teams, highlighting its success.