Language Matters Today and Every Day

Photo by: Steve Gumaer

No fancy bows or decadent dressing. No atmospheric lighting to alter your mood. Quite simply, this holiday season, Language Matters.

With Thanksgiving behind us and December already here, it is full steam ahead towards the joyful holiday season. Shopping lists, social engagements, and end of year work tasks have us all running around in a frenzy. Black Friday and Cyber Monday don’t help either. That feeling of needing to prepare is decidedly more pronounced at this time of year.

While going through my to-do list, I realized that there is one thing that I really must do before the year is out. That is to express my admiration and support for an organization that is close to my heart – Translators without Borders.  TWB, as we like to call it, strives to give people access to vital information, in a language and format they can understand.

As winter closes in, the TWB team is not thinking about shopping lists. They are planning ahead and thinking about crisis preparedness. As I write this, winterization messages are being disseminated hurriedly to humanitarian responders in several languages, to ensure that refugees in temporary accommodation in Greece can prepare themselves for the harsh conditions to come. TWB has teams of rapid response translators working in several languages so that content can be made available to non-profit organizations.

©2007 Rajal Thaker

So for the families in distress in refugee camps, thank you, Translators without Borders, for making their lives that little bit easier.

Please join me in supporting Translators without Borders this month. A donation from you will help to ensure that this important work can continue. And to show how important this is to me, I will send a copy of my Global Content Strategy book to everyone who donates $100.*

 Visit www.translatorswithoutborders.org/donate/

*For every donation of $100 to Translators without Borders in December, I will send a copy of my Global Content Strategy book. Please use the code #ContentRules in the donation form to qualify for this offer.

Thank you and happy holidays.

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Val Swisher

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc. Val enjoys helping companies solve complex content problems. She is a well-known expert in content strategy, structured authoring, global content, content development, and terminology management. Val believes content should be easy to read, cost-effective to create and translate, and efficient to manage. Her customers include industry giants such as Google, Cisco, Visa, Facebook, Roche, and IBM. Her fourth book, “The Personalization Paradox: Why Companies Fail (and How to Succeed) at Creating Personalized Experiences at Scale,” was published in 2021 by XML Press.

Val is on the Advisory Board for the Technical Communications Program at the University of North Texas. When not working with customers or students, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.

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