Global Talk

The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market, by ITC SIG member John R. Kohl, has recently been published by SAS Press.

This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English.

Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics:

• Ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent
• Ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities
• How to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand
• Punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient
• How language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard

Author John R. Kohl has worked at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. For the past several years, John has devoted much of his time to terminology issues and to refining the Global English guidelines. As a linguistic engineer, John customizes and supports tools and processes that help make SAS documentation more consistent, easier to translate, and easier for non-native speakers of English to understand. John has been interested in machine translation and other language technologies for many years, and he is a charter member of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.

You can view the table of contents, a sample chapter, and reviewers’ comments at http://support.sas.com/kohl. You can also order the book from that site, though you can get it at a discounted price through other online booksellers.

There are posts of interest on the STC Forum, in particular http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?pid=4075#p4075

The ITC SIG email list provided these links to Apple (PDF) and IBM resources.

Karen Mardahl has sent these links to Chinese and Japanese podcasts available for learning those languages.

http://www.chinesepod.com/ and http://japanesepod101.com/

These were found on a blog by a Chinese to English translator, which may be of interest for other posts too.

Bob Doyle has announced his new site, http://www.cms-global.org, a resource on globalization and content management. By means of filtered RSS feeds from CMS-News.org, it aggregates bloggers in the globalization field, including John Yunker, Don DePalma, and Multilingual magazine’s Blogos.

The site has glossaries of terms for globalization, localization, and machine translation, as well as links to bilingual glossaries in specialized fields. It also lists professional organizations worldwide.

The home page has been localized into a few languages. For example, the site serves Spanish to a browser set to Spanish. Bob hopes to do more languages (especially right-to-left languages and Asian double-byte languages) in the future.

The CM Pros Globalization Community will be working with the website committee to localize the CM Pros website navigation into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, right-to-left Hebrew, and double-byte Japanese.

Bob’s EContent column of October 3, 2006 is “Localizing Your Content.”

Document Design for International Audiences: Creating Communications that Cross Borders, a presentation by Karen Schriver, is available for download. The presentation was made on May 13, 2004 at the STIC symposium in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. STIC is the Dutch technical communication association.

Karen Mardahl provided the information in this article assembled by Global Talk. The information is from the 19 June 2006 issue of IST Results (news from the EU Information Society Technologies program) in an article titled “A common approach to accessibility for all.”

The article discusses efforts to harmonize the methodologies for achieving the goal of accessible websites. These efforts include: (more…)

This information is summarized by Global Talk from posts on the International Technical Communication SIG email list in April, 2006.

Abbreviations in the Latin language are often found in formal written English, and are required by some style guides. These abbreviations include:

• e.g. (exempla gratia, for example)
• i.e. (id est, that is)
• etc. (et cetera, and so on — literally, “and others”)
• n.b. (nota bene, note well).

The consensus on the International Technical Communication SIG list was that these Latin abbreviations have no place in technical documentation. We can not require readers whose first language is Arabic or Mandarin, for example, to know Latin. In fact the abbreviations i.e. and e.g. are often misused, suggesting native speakers of English do not understand them.

ITC SIG list members provided several references supporting their advice to avoid Latin abbreviations in technical documentation. (more…)

Global Talk is publishing this information from an ITC SIG list post in June, 2006.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online is a British dictionary that specifics US and British spelling for words where the spelling varies.

In a June, 2006 post on Council of Program in Technical and Scientific Communication list, Ian Gabriel (ian.gabriel at btinternet.com) reported he is coordinating updates to Guidelines for Writing English-Language Technical Documentation for an International Audience published by INTECOM in 2003. This document is available on the INTECOM website under Publications/Downloads.

Ian invited comments from users, regarding two main areas of update:

• Content: Should there be more or less detail? What other topics could be useful?
• Delivery options: Is a PDF file sufficient for online and offline use? Would an online help version, such as a CHM file, be useful?