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We were very interested in a certain company who have a Simplified English application called "HyperSTE" . While investigating whether to use it or not, we were given a presentation which had a collection of such facts which they used to make a case for precise English. The following were taken directly from that presentation (though I later tried to check some facts on internet but failed to verify any)
- A power transformer company was sued for $5M after a transformer blew up due to badly worded and confusing documentation.
- The largest single problem area for Google in internationalizing their service was language / translation issues - accounted for 35% of all reported issues.
- EMC estimates it was spending $762,000 on internationalization errors in just one product set.
- Failure to convert English measures to metric values caused the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, a spacecraft that smashed into the planet instead of reaching a safe orbit. Total project cost: $327.6M.
- An FAA survey of aircraft technicians revealed that, although user evaluations of the accuracy and quality of technical manuals are generally good, the manuals themselves were noted as having poor usability.
Using the wrong word in an accounting system cost the New York City Department of Education $1.4M
- A badly worded sentence in a contract cost a Canadian utility company $2.3M.
American Airlines had to ground their fleet of MD80s due ambiguity in the documentation.
- $11.9 MILLION JURY VERDICT against a manufacturer of an aerial lift device for failure to adequately warn of the electrocution hazards of the product and cover exposed metal on the boom tip of the lift truck.
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David Harrison | Controllers
Mold-Masters (UK) Limited | Global Hot Runner and Temperature Control Technology
Netherwood Road | Rotherwas Ind. Est.
Hereford | HR2 6JU | United Kingdom | Company Registration Number: 1912861
Tel: +44 (0) 1432 265 768 | Fax: +44 (0) 1432 263 782 mailto:dharrison -at- moldmasters -dot- com | www.moldmasters.com
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Sent on 27.02.2013 09:53 by David Harrison
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+dharrison=moldmasters -dot- co -dot- uk -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+dharrison=moldmasters -dot- co -dot- uk -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf Of Simon
Sent: 27 February 2013 00:36
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: product documentation liability
I have been browsing through Google and trying to find cases where manufacturers(or software company) is fined or cases brought against them for their inadequate or simply bad documentation because there is incidents or customer dissatisfaction involved. Are you aware of cases like this?
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