Global virtual teams create and translate technical documentation: Communication strategies, challenges and recommendations

Since 2013, students from the University of Limerick (UL), the University of Central Florida (UCF), and Université Paris Diderot (UPD) have collaborated on a documentation and translation assignment in virtual teams. The UL and UCF students, who study technical communication, collaborate to write procedural documents. The UPD students translate the documents into French. A key feature of the project design is the need for collaboration among the document writers and translators throughout the process. This paper provides a theoretical background to the project and describes the assignment that student teams collaborate on. It then offers guidelines for faculty wishing to organize similar projects.