Technical Writing in Israel

Originally published in Forward, the Newsletter of the STC UK Chapter, 2000

The fact that one of the largest STC Chapters outside North America is in Israel comes as a surprise to many people. But this very lively chapter now boasts over 100 members and has been well represented at STC conferences over the last few years. The Chapter also sent a delegate to the landmark STC Board meeting in Paris in September 1998.

Chapter member Deborah Shapiro was one of the interviewees in the May 1999 Intercom article on Technical Communicators around the world. Deborah works in a biotechnology company, and many chapter members work in other hi-tech sectors, particularly computer software. Many major international corporations have research and development facilities in Israel, for example Intel, Motorola, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, and 3-Com. In addition, Israel boasts a range of home-grown hi-tech companies including Mercury, Aladdin, Check Point and Scitex. Even the software that encodes and decodes the Sky satellite television signal is developed in Israel.

Israel is a small country and companies must export their products in order to thrive. For this reason, the majority of technical writers in Israel work in English, preparing marketing and technical literature for the world market. In some engineering and industrial companies there are technical writers who work in Hebrew or in other languages and they are also represented in the Chapter. Often a technical writer will be found working in a small group of writers in the development department of a large company. If the company is part of an international group, the writer may need to follow style guides and standards dictated by the head office. When I worked for a subsidiary of a Dutch software company, some of my work was edited and published in Holland.

Smaller companies may employ one writer, or hire a freelancer as needed, and there are also a number of specialist technical writing companies they undertake projects on a contractual basis.

One of the most lively activities of the technical writing community in Israel is the email discussion list “Tech-Shoret” [now hosted on Yahoo Groups] to which many chapter members subscribe. Some of the topics discussed are peculiar to Israel. For example, the behaviour of some Microsoft software (which can be “problematic” at the best of times) under bi-directional Hebrew-English versions of Windows can defy description!

Each year a number of commercial seminars are held in Israel and some of the visiting speakers have also addressed Chapter meetings, which have attracted large audiences. Most meetings of the Chapter take place in the Tel-Aviv area, which is the commercial center of the country, but some meetings are held in Jerusalem, and some in the Haifa area, as there are concentrations of hi-tech companies, and consequently of technical writers, in these places as well. The Chapter has a bi-monthly newsletter, i-contact, which is distributed to over 400 readers. If you would like more information about technical writing in Israel, or about the Chapter, you should pay a visit to the Israel Chapter’s web site.