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Subject:Re: Us Vs UK English, How Relevant? From:"Jennifer O'Neill" <jennifer -dot- oneill -at- village -dot- uunet -dot- be> To:"Techwr-l" <TECHWR-L -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 25 Feb 2004 19:23:34 +0100
I am based in Belgium and part of my work is to localise documentation from
our American sister companies. I can think of at least one occasion when an
American term caused confusion. While reading through a manual to check that
all was OK for localisation, I came across the term "military time".
???
Our products have nothing to do with the military. Eventually I found a
colleague who knew what it meant: 24-hour clock. On mainland Europe this
time format is used daily by everyone, not just the military. In the
documents we do in Europe in my company we only quote time in the 24-hour
format, never AM/PM. We understand AM/PM time (and may speak time that way,
"2 in the morning, 4 in the afternoon") but don't write it so.
I suppose other "American" terms that cause potential confusion to our
readers are units written only in inches and pounds. And then there are the
units written with fractions (3/16 inch). Fascinating. There are no
fractions in metric.
