ITC SIG member publishes Global English Style Guide
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.