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Laddar... The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Marketav John R. Kohl
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The Global English Style Guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of 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. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. Author John Kohl also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly. 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; and how language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard. This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world. This book is part of the SAS Press program. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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The book is very well organized, with clear headings, short sections and a pleasing visual layout. Information is often shown in table or list format, and the author provides abundant real-life examples to illustrate the concepts being discussed. You may disagree with some of the guidelines (for example, I found the author's use of hyphens excessive), but that is why they are called guidelines and not rules.
The author's comments on translation were particularly illuminating. Some of the real-life examples discussed the problems of pronouns with unclear referents, especially "it" and "them", when translating from English into a language where nouns have gender (e.g. French). If there are two possible referents and they have different genders, which does the translator choose? The time spent clarifying this issue is wasted time, especially when multiplied over several translations. Another guideline discussed the elimination of synonyms or variants, mainly to make translation memories and machine translation software more useful. If a term or phrase has several variants, sentences with the variants will be presented as "fuzzy" matches, and the translator will then have to look more closely at them and decide whether to use them. (Of course, the author's translation memory scenarios also assume that the translation memory itself is well maintained; if the sentences in the French and English versions of a document are misaligned, for example, or only one version is uploaded, then the memory will be of no help to the translator.)
The main thing to take away from this book is what the author calls the Cardinal Rule of Global English: "Don't make any change that will sound unnatural to native speakers of English." Basically, the guidelines he presents are a way for you to analyze your writing and ensure that you are saying what you want to say. This is a valid goal even if your writing is not destined for translation.
I would recommend this book if your job description includes writing of any stripe, from extremely technical software manuals to general press releases. ( )