People and organizations often communicate through technologies that restrict their communication to very few characters: a difficult task when the content is highly technical and specialized. This study relies on the theoretical work of informative and explanatory communication, and it expands the utility of this theory into new communication technology environments where brevity is valued and practically forced on the user. We content analyzed 1,367 Twitter messages spanning a 6-month time following a highly technical and controversial organizational event. The analyses reveal that even though Twitter is limited to 140 alphanumeric characters, almost one third of all messages contained some type of technical details. The technical translation strategies—direct, elucidating, or quasi-scientific—used in the microblog were either self-contained or briefly introduced with expanded details available by accessing hyperlinks. Furthermore, the specific types of technical translation strategies that this organization used changed over time.
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