As trade becomes global and technology allows more of the production o
f documentation to be done in-house, the difference between the roles
of technical writers and translators is narrowing. The assumptions und
erlying the training of technical translators and notions of quality i
n technical language do not yet reflect this change. Quality implies s
tandards, and that has recently come to mean international standards.
The concluding part of this article will look at some of the implicati
ons of the standardization of text conventions for communicating proce
dures across languages and cultures.