Re: Non-English tech writer

Subject: Re: Non-English tech writer
From: Janice Gelb <janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:29:26 +1100

Dan Goldstein <DGoldstein -at- riverainmedical -dot- com> wrote:


I don't get it. Even if they insisted on hiring in India, there must be
tech writers there who write fluently in American English. And if the
point was to get the absolute cheapest tech writing possible, they could
hire a newbie tech writer in India who needed to learn Word, FrameMaker,
etc. -- anything but English!


We have a writing group in Bangalore and I visited
the site in July. Much to my surprise, I learned
that some of the grammatical and other problems we
were finding in the documentation from the India
writers were the way they were taught to write in
school. The issue isn't so much that the writers
fail to grasp "proper" English but that the English
taught in India is apparently different than the
English taught in English-speaking countries. While
the documentation still needs to be heavily edited
in many cases to conform to our other documentation,
this realization did change the way I thought about
the writers and their writing skills.

I was there to do some editing training and all of
the editors are trying to provide detailed feedback
to convey our documentation expectations but it is a
resource hit that lessens the overall savings of
having the site in India, imho.

-- Janice

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References:
RE: Non-English tech writer: From: Humphries, Ola

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