Re: localizing gerunds? (was: Writing English for Translation)

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

See my comment earlier about conventions for specific markets. ;-)

Gerunds work well for English user documentation. A good translator
will not just focus on the words but will understand the intent and
will focus on using a similar tone and engagement style that works for
their target language and market. And of course, this needs to go back
into the localization style guide.

Translation is only part of localization.

Bill

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Monique Semp
<monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net> wrote:
> So this thread is reminding me of a topic that seemingly confronts me every
> time I write things that are to be localized: whether to use gerunds.
>
> So I'd welcome a general discussion: do you strongly advocate using gerunds,
> avoiding gerunds, it depends (on what?), or it just doesn't matter?
>
> Procedure writing advice seems pretty unanimous in recommending that gerunds
> be used, but localization advice seems to come out strongly against them.
>
> Well, mostly.  In Leah Guren's presentation in the recent User Assistance
> conference, we discussed this and her experience has been that localization
> vendors haven't had any problems with properly translating her procedure's
> gerunds into the target languages.
>
> So, I’m wondering, is it that there are different best practices depending
> on what the original authoring language and the target localization
> languages are, or is there any way to meld the different best practices (for
> English authoring vs. localization requirements)?
>
> I recently read a rather old blog post about this:
> http://idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/11/are-gerunds-in-topic-titles-problematic-in-search-results/.
> The blog post itself is quite short, but there are a lot of interesting
> comments.
>
> -Monique

-- 
Bill Swallow

Twitter: @techcommdood
Blog: http://techcommdood.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcommdood
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