Choosing the right word: Guidelines for our global audience?

Subject: Choosing the right word: Guidelines for our global audience?
From: Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>
To: techwr-l List <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>, Kate Wilcox <kwilcox -at- ensim -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 14:04:13 -0400

Kate Wilcox wondered: <<I've always loved Mark Twain's advice to "use
the right word and not its second cousin." But now that I'm working
for a company with a distributed workforce (writers in the US and
India) and a global audience, I'm starting to question which words
are right.>>

As you should. I spend a lot of time figuring out how to spot
problems in my own writing for an international audience, and fail
about as often as I succeed. It's a question of paying attention to
how others speak and the words they use, and learning to follow those
patterns instead of the ones we fall into by reflex after 20, 40, or
more years of following those patterns -- not an easy habit to break.
Think of it as learning another language and you won't be far wrong,
with the additional complication is that dialects such as Indian
English are close enough to the North American dialect that they
mislead us into assuming we're speaking the same language. That's
_almost_ true, and it's the "almost" that gets us in trouble.

With some persistence, you can find glossaries that translate (say)
American into British, but do you really have the time to run all
your communication through an idiom checker? Probably not.

The best advice I can give you is to find a colleague in the second
country (here, India) who can provide reliable advice, and pay close
attention to their advice until you've learned the most common tricks
and traps. Think of this as an exercise in localization, and you'll
get the picture: generally, the best candidate to do the localization
work is someone immersed in that culture. With lots of hard work, you
can get good enough to do a credible job, but to do a great job,
you'll need either a gift for the language and culture, more practice
than you have time to put in, or someone who's a native in that
culture if you want to succeed*.

* Most professional translators, when pressed, admit that they can't
speak their second language like a native. The ones I've talked to
(quite a few, over the years) grudgingly admit that they're good
enough to fool someone who isn't paying close attention, and several
top notch translators told me they only knew a few colleagues who
were even that good. So it's possible to master a second dialect this
well, but relatively rare to become sufficiently fluent you'll fool a
native. Note that "few" and "relative" don't mean that these people
can't be found, just that they're a small proportion of the total.


----------------------------------------------------
-- Geoff Hart
ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca / geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com
www.geoff-hart.com
--------------------------------------------------
***Now available*** _Effective onscreen editing_
(http://www.geoff-hart.com/home/onscreen-book.htm)


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References:
Choosing the right word: Guidelines for our global audience: From: Kate Wilcox

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