By Lisa Parys | Student Member
Although technical writing may have been around since ancient Babylon, according to an article in Technical Communication by Kathy Pringle and Sean Daniel Williams, one thing that hasn’t changed is the continuing need for good content and well-designed interfaces. Many people have failed to fully consider how far-reaching websites and social media are for businesses. For example, Barilla, an Italian pasta company, has now become a household name in the United States. They also have a great online presence at www.barilla.com.
Similarly, American companies are making inroads into foreign countries in ways that are not always intentional. The Internet remains a primary platform. It is in this context that people in other countries become unseen users who are not always considered in our design. We often think that just because we use a .com URL and address our audience in English that people from other countries will not be viewing our content. This, however, is not necessarily true.
We can’t assume that nonnative English-speaking users only read our content when we write it in their native language. While offering translations might seem like the ideal, it is not often feasible. For example, what happens when your organization has a limited budget? The most realistic solution is to design your content so that it is easy to interpret; that is what creating good content is really all about.
The Interpals website is a primary example of how this can be done effectively. The site is viewed by people from all over the world, most of them looking for pen pals. The designers of this site are obviously aware of their international audience, yet they still design their interfaces—the design that allows people to interact with the site—in English. We can and should learn some best practices that we can for those times when designing and writing content in multiple languages is not an option. Here are a just a few of them to provide a quick overview.
Writing in English: Best Practices
How can we write our documentation in such a way that those with limited English proficiency will understand our message and feel comfortable with our content? In truth, it may not be much different that the way documents are often edited so that they are easier to translate into foreign languages. Ann H. Adams, Gail W. Austin, and Melissa Taylor wrote in 1999 about IBM’s efforts to make their documents more translatable. The following is a summary of some of their suggestions, as well as those of other articles, along with my reasons for why this makes good content creation sense overall.
Avoid words with more than one meaning.
Avoiding words with more than one meaning can make it easier for nonnative English speakers to understand your intended meaning. This is particularly true if you will draw from one meaning in one instance and another in a second or third instance. Consider the word, “organic.” A search of the word on the website dictionary.com contained at least three different potential meanings. One is a type of food while another means “pertaining to living organs.” So which meaning does the writer intend?
Native English speakers may discover which one is intended more easily than nonnative speakers; they simply look at the context. However, it might be difficult for nonnative speakers to ascertain this. Therefore it is good practice to avoid using the word in multiple meanings or at least link its usage to a glossary of possible meanings and point to which meaning is intended in which instance.
Don’t talk down to nonnative English speakers.
Jean Weber wrote, “Some people whose first language is not English learned English at a very early age, so are quite bilingual.” Like many audiences, a nonnative English speaking audience, particularly an educated one, will more than likely pick up on the fact that you are talking down to them and feel they are being treated condescendingly. This is perhaps one of the worst feelings audiences can pick up from technical communicators.
We want our audience members to come away from our content having obtained the knowledge they needed and wanted to get from it in the first place, but not in a way that makes them feel as though we think that they are not intelligent. The fact that more countries are teaching their students English should make us even more considerate in how we write and design our content, not less.
Avoid humor.
As Adams, Austin, and Taylor have pointed out, humor doesn’t translate well, not just from one language to another but also from one culture to another (1999). Humor also probably wouldn’t go over well in cases where the audience has little knowledge of where it is coming from. The lack of translatability doesn’t mean that our audience lacks knowledge, just the context. We must not assume they will understand culture-specific metaphors.
It also doesn’t mean that they can’t be translated into another language, but they don’t mean the same thing when taken outside of their cultural and linguistic context. In fact, what is humorous in one language may be quite offensive in another and is usually “cultural-specific” (Adams et al., 1999). So even in a relatively benign scenario, users may not understand what the writer is trying to convey.
Don’t use idioms.
Idiomatic expressions also vary from country to country. For example, imagine a conversation with a newly arrived foreigner where the American speaker says, “Tell me about it.” This expression might confuse the new arrival when she has just finished telling her story to the American. “What else does he want to know?” she might wonder.
Even moving from one region to another in the same country might expose a new arrival to expressions that he or she has never heard of. For example, in North Carolina there are many expressions that are not commonly heard in places such as California or the Northeast and vice versa. Although the United States is an exceptionally large country, it is likely that regional differences of idiomatic expressions exist in other countries as well.
Consider the use of videos and visuals.
In a 2007 article, George Hayhoe describes a time when he visited one of his students who was working for a fast food company for her internship. He was surprised to find that what she was working on was actually a wordless video instructing workers with limited English proficiency in the company’s preferred procedure for making lemonade. Hayhoe wondered whether there would be a future for writing if this trend continues and concluded that there would be. After all, someone would have to script the actions of the talent.
Videos can also work for other platforms as well, especially when demonstrating something for audiences. And in some situations such as on airplanes, they are necessary. In situations where we elect to use words, we should make sure that any speech or sound on the video is understandable by second language learners.
Visuals can also help in reinforcing the information that companies try to convey to customers. While it may not be possible to consider every possible culture and its norms (rules that a society uses to guide the behavior of its members) when designing visuals, it is possible to make our images as universally appealing as possible.
Conclusion
Designing our English language documents with foreign audiences in mind is not just good for business; it’s also good for our employer’s reputation abroad. This goes back to the fundamental rule that most of us learned in our first technical writing class or on our first assignment—consider your audience. That’s what we aim for as we create content.
These principles apply not just to those documents which companies mark for translation into other languages but also for those that will remain in English. We must create our English content with a worldwide audience in mind. Whether we imagine it or not, we are reaching the world.
References
Adams, Anne, Gail Austin, & Melissa Taylor. Developing a Resource for Multinational Writing at Xerox Corporation. Technical Communication 46.2 (1999): 249–254.
Hayhoe, George. The Future of Technical Writing and Editing. Technical Communication 54.3 (2007): 281–282.
Pringle, Kathy, and Sean Daniel Williams. The Future Is the Past: Has Technical Communication Arrived as a Profession? Technical Communication, 52.3 (2005): 361–369.
Weber, Jean. Editing for an International Audience. Technical Editors’ Eyrie, 2002, www.jeanweber.com/newsite/?page_id=56.
LISA PARYS (lparys3@gmail.com) currently lives in New Bern, NC, and is studying for a master’s certificate at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Looking to transition into the technical communication field, Lisa is primarily focusing on intercultural and scientific communication.
