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Dharuni Garikapaty wonders: <<With companies and products being used across
the globe, documentation needs to meet the English vocabulary and style in
sync with the ALL users spread across - for the most part American and
European. 1. How do you handle this requirement?>>
I don't actually produce materials for anything other than a Canadian
audience (formerly American audiences too), so I don't handle this specific
problem. But my readings of the literature in this area and my experience as
a French translator suggest two things: First, there is no such thing as
"Global English". There are instead many different dialects (MS Word 97
ships with 13 different English dictionaries, and more are undoubtedly
available). Second, a "one size fits all" solution usually means that nobody
is particularly comfortable.
That being the case, the best solution is to create a single optimized
version for your main audience, then turn that version over to a skilled
"localizer" who is expert in a particular flavor of English and can adapt
the document for that dialect. (A localizer is something like a translator,
but has specific expertise in a dialect. So for example, I can translate
into Quebec French, but if I want something written for France, I need a
localizer expert in the dialects used in France to edit my efforts.)
Full localization is not always economically feasible, but when it is, it's
the best solution. But whether or not you try localization, you can make
life much easier for your main audience, for those who live elsewhere but
will use that main version, and for any localizers you can afford if you
follow a few simple rules:
- Write simply and clearly, avoiding idiomatic phrases (metaphors and
similes particularly) and complex or convoluted sentence structures. Avoid
humor. It's difficult to be funny in your own language, let alone in someone
else's unfamiliar culture.
- Take great pains to use words consistently: each technical word should
have a single primary meaning, and you should never use multiple words to
express a single technical concept. The same advice applies to less
technical words, though to a lesser extent. (Research "simplified English"
or "controlled English" on the Web and you'll come up with lots of
guidelines on how this can be done effectively.)
- Have a professional editor review the source document that will then
undergo localization. Hire another editor in each country that will receive
the document, and instruct them to concentrate solely on phrases that don't
work well in their culture (rather than formally editing the entire
document).
There's more to it than this, of course, but these are probably the three
biggest areas to focus on.
--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. (Oh! Was I
speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips
out.)--Anonymous
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