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The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market
This detailed, example-driven guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. The author also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly. Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent; ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities; how to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand; punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient; and how language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard. This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world.
340 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2007
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64 people want to read
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March 5, 2020
Aimed at technical writers more than novelists, this is an excellent guide to writing English in a way that is easier for non-native speakers to understand and for translators to translate. It includes plenty of examples.
However, it also reprises many rules and guidelines of English grammar that would be useful to a wider audience.
Although much of the guidance just reinforced what I already know and do professionally (though not in reviews!), it was good to have it crystallised, aided by lots of clear practical examples and the fact it is easy to find information.
Cardinal rule
Don’t make any change that will sound unnatural to a native English speaker, just to fit the global guidance.
Key points
• Use correct, standard grammar and punctuation. (Follow the prescriptivists, for once.)
• Avoid idioms and non-literal analogies (do you really "hover" over something on a screen?) unless you are sure they are standard terms and have been defined. Even then, machine translation may slip up.
• Watch for ambiguity, especially in noun phrases; hyphenation can help. Is a “spatial data file” a data file that is spatial or a file that contains spatial data?
• Keep related sentence components together; try not to separate them with other elements ("turn off the zoom tool by clicking" is better than "turn the zoom tool off").
• Keep sentences short and be generous with commas. Have potential interrupters like "however", "for example" and "if necessary" at the start of a new sentence, rather than the middle of a longer one.
• Bullets are great. But make sure the lead-in words fit what follows and that each bullet point makes sense on its own.
• Limit passives. They are tricky to translate because many languages use it less or in different ways.
• Be positive; negatives, especially multiple ones, can be confusing.
• Use verb-centered writing ("explain" is better than "provide an explanation").
• Use simplest tense. In particular, beware the unnecessary future (auxiliary “will”): "X has no effect" is better than "X will have no effect".
• Ensure it's clear exactly what pronouns and phrases like “either... or” and "both... and” refer to.
• Reinforce causality with "If... then...".
• Gerunds - gah. They have a whole chapter. Look for ambiguity, punctuate correctly, consider using hyphens. Take care with gerund headings when it’s not clear if it’s a verb or a noun, e.g. is “Editing options” about how to edit options or is it about options for editing?
• Use syntactic cues (including the much derided "that", especially after verbs such as: assume, ensure, require, specify), even if they add slightly to length.
• Initial capitals are often over-used. It's not just a visual distraction; translators often don't translate proper nouns.
• Consistency is even more important for documents that will be translated, so take special care with any that are worked on by more than one author.
However, it also reprises many rules and guidelines of English grammar that would be useful to a wider audience.
Although much of the guidance just reinforced what I already know and do professionally (though not in reviews!), it was good to have it crystallised, aided by lots of clear practical examples and the fact it is easy to find information.
Cardinal rule
Don’t make any change that will sound unnatural to a native English speaker, just to fit the global guidance.
Key points
• Use correct, standard grammar and punctuation. (Follow the prescriptivists, for once.)
• Avoid idioms and non-literal analogies (do you really "hover" over something on a screen?) unless you are sure they are standard terms and have been defined. Even then, machine translation may slip up.
• Watch for ambiguity, especially in noun phrases; hyphenation can help. Is a “spatial data file” a data file that is spatial or a file that contains spatial data?
• Keep related sentence components together; try not to separate them with other elements ("turn off the zoom tool by clicking" is better than "turn the zoom tool off").
• Keep sentences short and be generous with commas. Have potential interrupters like "however", "for example" and "if necessary" at the start of a new sentence, rather than the middle of a longer one.
• Bullets are great. But make sure the lead-in words fit what follows and that each bullet point makes sense on its own.
• Limit passives. They are tricky to translate because many languages use it less or in different ways.
• Be positive; negatives, especially multiple ones, can be confusing.
• Use verb-centered writing ("explain" is better than "provide an explanation").
• Use simplest tense. In particular, beware the unnecessary future (auxiliary “will”): "X has no effect" is better than "X will have no effect".
• Ensure it's clear exactly what pronouns and phrases like “either... or” and "both... and” refer to.
• Reinforce causality with "If... then...".
• Gerunds - gah. They have a whole chapter. Look for ambiguity, punctuate correctly, consider using hyphens. Take care with gerund headings when it’s not clear if it’s a verb or a noun, e.g. is “Editing options” about how to edit options or is it about options for editing?
• Use syntactic cues (including the much derided "that", especially after verbs such as: assume, ensure, require, specify), even if they add slightly to length.
• Initial capitals are often over-used. It's not just a visual distraction; translators often don't translate proper nouns.
• Consistency is even more important for documents that will be translated, so take special care with any that are worked on by more than one author.
Displaying 1 of 1 review