English for Digital Designers was born out of a passion for teaching English, creating websites and using digital tools in teaching. While teaching information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX), we often noticed the inconsistency of technical terminology in books, academic articles, industry blogs, conference speeches and conversations with students.
English for Digital Designers was prepared for people involved in designing digital products and students of information architecture, information space design, digital design and UX design. The original English texts presented here come from several sources:
The contents, divided into 20 lessons, have been selected in such a way to comprehensively cover the topic of digital product design. We collected the texts in spring 2020. We have translated all the materials into Polish, and the two-column structure makes it possible to hide selected portions of the text, thus facilitating learning the translation in both directions. As we aim to help students and people engaged in the digital product design industry to improve their skills in using professional languages, we have tried to remain faithful to the original content and format. However, this does not mean that translations are completely literal. In the Polish-language texts, we have considered the professional terminology, the specificity of statements and their meanings, while making minor corrections. The translation of English-language content is therefore the result of a compromise between translation precision and linguistic flawlessness.
The English texts are accompanied by recordings of native speakers from Great Britain, the United States and Canada. Nineteen native speakers have lent their voices to this course, which guarantees a variety of pronunciations and accents.
Each lesson contains exercises that check your vocabulary and consolidate factual knowledge. The service is supplemented by an English-Polish dictionary of IA, UX, UI & SEO, published as an e-book (PDF) by University of Silesia Press (2021).
English for Digital Designers can be used as primary or supplementary material in university classes or company courses, and also as a synthetic e-book for individual acquisition of knowledge and linguistic skills.
We wish you pleasant and effective learning!
Authors:
Dr Jacek Tomaszczyk is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland. He teaches courses in information architecture theory and English for information and communication technology. His main research interests are terminology, information management and knowledge organisation.
Dr Anna Matysek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland. She teaches courses in information spaces architecture, user interface design and content management systems. She is interested in digital tools, information behaviour and information retrieval in digital environments.
The authors created the curriculum for the Information Architecture bachelor’s degree at the University of Silesia in Katowice.
Proofreading of the Polish translation: Dr Agnieszka Gołda, an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia.
