Technical writing newsletter 33: October 2009
International English
Translation and localisation is expensive. At the Technical Communication UK 2009 conference, Mike Unwalla explained that companies can use international English to decrease translation costs (www.technicalcommunicationuk.com/index.php?/programme.html#MU).
Quality of machine translation
To decrease translation costs, some companies use machine translation (automatic computer translation). If text is optimised for machine translation, machine translation gives satisfactory results (www.international-english.co.uk/mt-evaluation-en-es.html). An English article was translated into Spanish by Google Translate. Professional translators evaluated the machine translation for fluency and for accuracy.
Globish
English is important for international business, but English is a complex language. Globish is a method of simplifying English to make English easy for non-native speakers. The general principle of Globish is good, but there are problems with Globish.
Interface design
Sometimes, documentation is necessary to explain how to use a badly-designed user interface. To help users, a better option is to make sure that the user interface is good. For a useful checklist and for examples of bad design, see www.gui-bloopers.com.
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