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Re(2): Need Your Opinions re Simplified English (Can I quote you?)
Subject:Re(2): Need Your Opinions re Simplified English (Can I quote you?) From:Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 31 May 2002 17:09:58 +0200
>Here's a concept... 'simplified French' or how about "German for
>non-Germans?'
Sure - as soon as French or German becomes the official language for
international air traffic :-)
>If the documents are in English, the assumption should be that the users of
>those documents are native readers of English. If the users of documents are
>native readers of some other language then 100% of the documents in question
>should be translated into and published in that other language. If that
>requires a hundred different language sets, then so be it.
This is not really practical in many contexts. For exmaple, I am told
that the documentation of an commercial airliner already weighs more than
the airliner itself. Now multiply that by, say, 50 languages. How are you
going to store all this documentation? How are you going to finance the
translation?
How will you manage the practical issues like flying an airliner from LA
to Hong Kong and not yet being sure of the nationalities of the return
crew? While the inflight documentation weighs somewhat less than the
airplane, carrying native language manuals for all possible candidates
could be pretty expensive too.
>In safety-critical situations, ALL THE DOCUMENTATION should be in the native
>language of the reader! No exceptions! No cost spared to do this!
And why would this be? The present systems seems to work quite well, so
it does not appear that the added expense would bring safety increases.
In effect, you would be spending money - a lot of money! - simply in
order to avoid "corrupting the English". (In addition, much of the money
would have to be spent be non-English speaking nations. This goes way
beyond the French who at least keep the issues with keeping Frechn 'pure'
to their own society.)
Regards
Jan Henning
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Jan Henning
ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH
Am Schlossberg 14, D-82547 Eurasburg, Germany
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