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QE Tech is a Tokyo-based IT company, a small firm with extensive experience in the management of cross-cultural corporate communications. As more and more business correspondence and documentation must now travel across cultures, QE Tech's Authoring Technology © helps international companies with multilingual staff to create logical, meaningful and consistent e-mail messages and other documents in English.
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Employees of many international companies have trouble communicating in English when it is their second language. A standard response is to rely on written communications such as e-mail, which has its own drawbacks – its time consuming, messages get lost in translation, it is common to see opaque logic and reasoning, and sometimes offense is unwittingly given…
The common work-around, skills development training is expensive and improvement is not assured. QE Tech WritE-mail is a software tool enabling companies to overcome these difficulties, acting as a productivity tool for business as well as a learning platform for employees.
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Companies implementing QE Tech WritE-mail experience a boost in English documentation productivity in a number of ways. Non-native employees can write faster, and with more confidence, with more natural expression and clarity. Skills in composition and phrasing are actually measurably improved, and developed on the job without the need for extensive classroom training. Mail messages are understood more readily and responded to faster, without managers needing to intervene. Information flows productively across the enterprise. And a chronic skills development issue finally gets a long term solution. |
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Translation is actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. Translation is expensive when done by human professionals, unreliable when done by others, and generally unreadable when performed by machines. Translation has its place, but it's not in writing e-mail to customers or global partners. QE Tech WritE-mail helps users to create their correspondence in English, which is the most efficient way to author documentation for global distribution. |
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QE Tech WritE-mail certainly exploits and allows customizing of linguistic patterns in the way a template does, but templates are not the solution; problems exist with managing versions, and users must navigate libraries of templates looking for the right one to use in each situation. QE Tech WritE-mail can do things templates cannot do, like allowing flexibility and user discretion, giving translation assistance to help users, guidance on appropriate tone, and learning. |
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A single user license for QE Tech WritE-mail starts at ¥10,000 for the entry-level Personal Edition, ¥40,000 for the Professional Edition with phrase adaptability, and from ¥20,000 per year for the fully customizable Enterprise Edition, including Upgrades and Technical Support. Upgrades for the Personal Edition are available for ¥5,000 per year. Payments can be made by bank transfer or Paypal.
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Many ways, actually. We can measure quantitatively the time taken to perform a writing task, and measure again using the software. In the space of just a three hour training seminar, we have seen 50% time savings and this increases as users gain more familiarity with the software. A second way is a qualitative measure, measured by the look on the face of the user's manager when they read the old message and the new. A third measure is feedback from the reader's side; response time frequently falls, the number of clarifying mail declines, and international relations improve. |
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Well there is a significant improvement inside of three hours, after the user takes a training seminar. With an intensive program of customization, you could expect to see a major productivity boost well before three months has passed. And that is a permanent change.
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QE Tech WritE-mail offers benefits for users of all English language skill levels.
Although absolute beginners may be able to get some useful input, low to intermediate level English speakers will find their business writing skills greatly enhanced, and be able to write messages with considerably more fluency and clarity, and more productively.
Higher intermediate and advanced speakers will learn as they get consistent exposure to natural English expression and information logic, and gain confidence with the use of the Tone Wizard, plus save a lot time in composition.
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That is something we have been asked about a lot. Our experience has been the opposite, that QE Tech WritE-mail builds skills. Exposure to the patterns of communication is how native speakers learn to author documents and non-native speakers can learn written communications cognitively in the same manner.
Job performance is the main objective. Other tools have reduced workloads in a similar way, such as calculators, or spreadsheets, which have made arithmetic faster, and even word processors have reduced the need for drilling hand-writing at school. In truth, office workers probably cannot do long division in their heads because of the calculator, but job performance is much improved anyway.
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QE Tech is committed to respecting privacy and confidentiality, just as our customers are. WritE-mail exchanges a packet with the server to confirm the user license is paid up and valid, and also we request contact information to better provide tech support. No other data is exchanged or collected by QE Tech without the customer's permission. For more information, please see our Privacy Policy
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Since January 2004 we have been marketing the new version 2.0 of WritE-mail, customizable and integrated in Outlook, and have found markets mainly in Japanese manufacturing firms, several investment banks, and other financial services companies. With our next version – for use with Lotus Notes and Outlook Express – nearly ready, we are getting a lot of interest from a range of new customers in global businesses.
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Users get best results when they are building documents from relevant sources, and the process of Customization is essentially one of studying the user's needs, building the vocabulary or "taxonomy", and making it available from QE Tech WritE-mail. Customization is technically complex at present, and so performed only by QE Tech staff for now, we will soon offer a new editing tool making the process simply a matter of a knowledgeable language professional editing the content of individual users' phrases and logic buttons.
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QE Tech WritE-mail is installed on users' hard disks either from our website download area or directly via media such as CD, and additionally installation can be easily invoked by a central IT department without touching the client. There is contact with the QE Tech server for registration/support and verification purposes, or with a Enterprise Edition site license the server can be located inside the customer network so if required. QE Tech can provide more specific technical details on request.
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QE Tech WritE-mail requires Windows 2000 or XP operating systems, English or Japanese, MS Outlook and about 6MB of hard disk space. You need Administrator privileges to install QE Tech WritE-mail
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QE Tech WritE-mail for Outlook is integrated into Microsoft's popular Outlook e-mail program. Coming soon is QE Tech WritE-mail for Windows, which works with any standard windows e-mail client, including Outlook Express, Lotus Notes Mail, Netscape and Eudora. Check back at the QE Tech website for more details, or if you would like us to notify you of this release, contact us.
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QE Tech WritE-mail utilizes Authoring Technologies © that have applications in many areas. Versions are in planning and development adapted for Chinese, S.E. Asian and European users, but also for use in different documents, and with other multi-lingual features. |
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