international communication

[Michele_Berkes -at- CCMAIL -dot- OSTI -dot- GOV]

Thanks to Lars, Buck Buchanan, Barbara Green, Wayne Douglass, Hal
Wrobel, Charlotte, Percy Balemans, Naomi Kritzer, John Bell, and Geoff
Hart for their responses to my question about writing for an
international audience. (Apologies if I missed someone -- all input is
truly appreciated.)

I'd like to comment a bit on some of the advice I recieved, and then
provide a more traditional summary.

I received advice from Israel that the "apostrophe s" construction for
showing possession does not occur in other languages, and so X of Y
"Chemistry Department of Stanford University" would be more widely
understood. Then I received advice from Denmark that in Danish, they
would use "the university's department".

Another person said to "avoid complicated constructions (i.e. option 1
in both your examples)."

> Option 1: worked in the United States as a research fellow at the
> Chemistry Department of Stanford University, California
> Option 1: in charge of developing, managing, and producing
> databases

These bits of advice reinforce my underlying feeling that on
specific constructions, there is no one answer that will be helpful
for all audiences.

Here's a brief summary of other suggestions that I've recieved:

* A few folks who are themselves non-native speakers or who work in
non-English speaking areas offered themselves as resources. Thank you
very much!
* Keeping to a reading level of about 4th grade or 8th grade.
* Recommendation of Berlitz for their writing for translation course.
* free "Accent on Internationalization" brochure from International
Language Engineering Web site (http://www.ile.com/)
* Chapter 8 of Philip Rubens, ed., _Science and Technical Writing: A
Manual of Style_ (ISBN 0-8050-1831-X) for addressing non-native
readers. It's the best advice in the shortest space (25 pages) that
this person knows.
* Advice from Israel that "apostrophe s" for showing possession does
not exist in other languages, as far as I know. Even adding just an
"s" to the noun would occur only in the Germanic languages. X of Y
would be more widely understood.
* Advice from Denmark that in Danish, they would use "the university's
department"
* In various ways, several admonitions to be careful about local
(American) expressions and idioms that, if translated literally, would
sound ridiculous.
* Suggestion to be precise and use the phrasing that works best in
English.
* Be aware of differences between British and American English (with
the observation that most non-native speakers learn British English)
* Information about Simplified and Basic English (which are
trademarked products -- subsets of English -- that one can purchase)

Finally, there was some good information provided about translation
and localization. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but my materials will
most likely be used as is -- no localization or translation. I wish I
could rely on an informed translator to help smooth the linguistic
bumps in the road (gerunds, possesives), but I cannot. This is the
basic problem I've been running into -- much of the information out
there assumes that there will be translation and/or localization. For
our relatively limited direct audience and within the budget that our
members have allocated, these just are not options for me. This is
*not* a slam against the person who suggested this, just a frustrated
wail.

I haven't received any complaints from our members (on the contrary,
we get compliments), but I still want to make sure that I'm doing the
best I can. And, when there are differences of opinion on the staff,
I'd like to be able to rely on more authoritative resources than my
gut. Or at least educate my ear better so that my gut is more
reliable.

Bottom line, I'm going to try to walk the tightrope between keeping
sentence structure and vocabulary simple enough for the non-native
speakers without being so simple as to insult the fluent English
speakers. And I'll look up these resources and keep fine-tuning that
ear of mine.

Thanks to everyone!

Michele Berkes
Energy Technology Data Exchange
michele_berkes -at- ccmail -dot- osti -dot- gov
www.etde.org

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