Re: English for Asian readers

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

|}
|} >[Japanese] do not like books with a lot of white-space. In fact, the denser,
|} >the better. Text-density is desirable feature.


Steven Youra writes:
|}
|} It's been my impression that they [please excuse the generalization] favor
|} the visual over the verbal--icons over text.  What do others know about
|} this?

I attended a presentation by Yasushi Nakajima at the STC Conference in
Dallas this year. He is a documentation Manager at Fujitsu Limited in
Kawasaki, Japan. It was his considered opinion that the Japanese preference
for all inclusive figures and tables, and text-dense pages was due to the
more inductive reasoning methods used by the Japanese.

His extreme simplification of inductive reasoning was that you attempted
to gather as much information as possible before making a decision. I
have heard it better described as circular reasoning, rather than linear.
At any rate, a verbose page suits inductive reasoning better than it does
deductive reasoning. The result (and he showed some frightening examples)
is a tendency for Japanese documents to contain huge foldout illustrations
with massive quantities of information portrayed on a single page.

I don't claim to be an expert, but these were Yasushi-san's findings...
Now since we all know that communication is based on the shared world
view, differences in the world view can make for some sticky communication
issues, it seems to me. Issues that it may not be possible to fully
comprehend without a great deal of applied study.

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