Languages and reality

["Tim Altom" <taltom -at- simplywritten -dot- com>]

I've received some nice but pointed responses to my opinion that it's not
necessarily arrogance nor laziness that prompts many companies to supply
materials only in English. Several people have expressed the counter-opinion
that the appearance of arrogance is as bad as its reality.

Perhaps an explanation of my initial point is in order.

Documentation is expensive stuff. Many tech doc'ers know this intellectually
but, never having actually signed the checks to make it, they don't have a
visceral grasp of just how expensive it really is. Few practitioners ever
rise to a management level high enough to see these numbers, nor aspire to
be contractors where the numbers are likewise visible.

Consider that the industry average of per-page output is in the neighborhood
of 3-4 hours per page. Accept the lower figure, assume that the writer is
making $45K per year, and you now have a rough average of $21.6 per hour, or
about $65 per page. And that's a very low estimate, because the average
employee costs somewhere between 1.5X and 3X base salary in total burden.
That $65 per page, therefore, quickly balloons even at the low-end 1.5X to
almost $100 per page, or about $10,000 for a typical 100-page manual,
without additional work. At the upper end, that sum can double or triple.

Now add translations for every country you're planning to ship to,
regardless of how many boxes you'll sell in each market. A translation is
almost as expensive as original writing, if it's done well. Do a bad
translation, and you might as well stick with English. Good technical
translators are rare. Few translators know how to phrase "initialize the
network daemon" in Portuguese.

Let's say you luck out and find a really good translator for a small price,
and your $10K manual will probably get about $2K-$5K worth of translation,
again at the very, very low end of the scale. That's as much as a 50%
markup, and the money has to come from somewhere. It may not be possible in
a highly competitive market to jack up the price to the customer, so it has
to come right off the bottom line. But that's where the invisible partners
are clustered, the investors who are agitating for 50% per-year growth. Or
would you rather dispense with one of the $70K-per-year senior programmers,
who could move your product forward into its next version?

The reality is that translations are often left off the to-do list not
because of arrogance or cultural jingoism, but because good translations are
too much to pay for. And why would it be that Americans (US Americans, that
means) get the cold shoulder for supposed cultural language arrogance, when
the Brits and the Canadians are just as blase' about preferentially using
English? The Canadians have an undeserved reputation for being open to other
languages, but I know of at least some who don't feel so linguistically
open. I have Canadian friends who are generally no more enamored of French
than US citizens are. They frequently express the opinion that French is
being foisted on them. Yet Canadians don't catch as much grief as US folks
for supposed culture export and linguistic bigotry.

Perhaps it wouldn't hurt our children in this country to learn foreign
languages earlier, but when it comes time to supply manual translations,
business factors matter as much or more than cultural ones. If a US company
ships 50% of its output to Japan and the Japanese are asking for
translations, then it would be worthwhile. In many situations, the decision
isn't a hard one, given the bleak, hard numbers. And given how often modern
products are shipped with sloppy, emaciated, or nonexistent documentation of
any kind, nowadays a customer can at least take solace in having something
at all, even if it's in a foreign tongue.


Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
Featuring FrameMaker and the Clustar(TM) System
"Better communication is a service to mankind."
317.562.9298
Check our Web site for the upcoming Clustar class info
http://www.simplywritten.com



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