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Subject:Re: Definately and English teachers... From:Matt Ion <mion -at- DIRECT -dot- CA> Date:Sat, 10 Jun 1995 17:22:45 EDT
On Tue, 6 Jun 1995 16:16:17 -400 you wrote:
>The problem was, what I was trying to find out got
>twisted around the wrong way because of her incorrect use of terms and I am
>fairly computer literate. If documentation is written this way, it's worse
>than usual!!!
I just helped a friend of mine set up her computer today. She didn't know
much about it other than that it had three components: the monitor, the
keyboard, and the hard drive (the big box that everything plugs into).
Fortunately, we started off the afternoon with her knowing that I was far more
technically literate than she, and she thus believed me implicitly when I took
the cover off the big beige box and pointed out how little of the space was
actually consumed by the "hard drive" (well, okay, it was actually a fair bit
of space, this machine being a PS/2 Model 30 with a first-generation IDE drive
:-).
>It's also important for those who may be originally from another country and
>emmigrated here. English as a second language complicated by misspellings can
>be nearly impossible. My boyfriend (who has been in the States for 12 yrs and
>speaking English for much longer than that) still has trouble if words are
>misspelled. There are many professionals in the workforce today who were not
>born and raised here.
The majority of hardware and software manuals that I come across complicate
this even further... so many of them appear to have been translated by
computer from the original Japanese or something, with little or no subsequent
editing. Here's a real gem from a motherboard manual I have laying about (all
text exactly as it appears in print):
"The PRECISION 386 III Mother Board is a 386-based IBM PC/AT<tm> compatible
system board. It is specially use the OPTI HiD/386 AT CHIPSET, the HiD/386
Chipset consists of the 82C381-B and 82C382-B. Together, they are designed to
implement high performance, highly integrated PRECISIONS 386 AT personal
computer running 25MHz."
Huh? :-)
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