Category: Style

Editor’s Note: This article is an interview with John Kohl, the author of The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. John has been working at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. His book is available from SAS Press and from many online booksellers. John will be presenting on this topic at the October 2008 membership meeting of the Technical Editing SIG, and we wanted to whet your appetite with this interview for attending our meeting!

What central problem does your book, The Global English Style Guide, address?
The need to communicate clearly to a global audience—an audience that includes non-native speakers of English, translators, and perhaps also machine-translation software, as well as native speakers. The Global English guidelines are based on empirical research, and the book provides much more detailed explanations of these guidelines than can be found in any other single source.

What was your motivation for writing your book?
I’ve studied foreign languages (German, French, Russian, and Spanish) and have taught English to non-native speakers. As a result, I have a lot of empathy and understanding for people who are reading in what, for them, is a foreign or second language. I understand how much of a difference the style and vocabulary in a document can make to a non-native speaker’s ability to comprehend the material.

I’m also very sensitive to the types of ambiguities that leave translators scratching their heads. Translation is more efficient and more accurate when the English source texts are written clearly and simply.

What made you decide to publish these guidelines?
I really did not want to put the time and effort into writing this book, so for 15 years I waited, thinking that surely someone else would write it (or a book like it). In the meantime, I was speaking about Global English at various conferences and offering workshops at SAS and for a few other companies. I could see that there was a lot of interest in the topic and a need for an example-driven book that covered the topic thoroughly.

When I finally decided that I should write the book, I was pleasantly surprised that SAS Press was interested in publishing it. It’s the first book they have published that does not pertain specifically to SAS software or to software-related topics. The opportunity to work with them instead of with an outside publisher made the prospect of writing and publishing the book less daunting. I don’t know if I’d have written it if I had had to seek an outside publisher.

What features of the book especially pleased you?
I’m happy that I was able to cover the topic as thoroughly as I did. Some authors on the topic of writing for international audiences have done little more than admonish authors to “write clearly.” That advice is not very helpful! Writers and editors need specific guidelines that help them recognize ambiguities and other unnecessary impediments to the translation process. And they need enough of an explanation and enough examples that they can actually understand and apply those guidelines. I’ve done my best to meet those requirements in this book.

What is your most significant finding?
I think my most substantial contribution has been my research on syntactic cues—the little function words (usually “closed class” words such as pronouns, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and so on) that many writers and editors have been taught to eliminate, but which are often essential for eliminating ambiguities and for improving readability. I’ve done a very thorough job of identifying and explaining the contexts in which these syntactic cues add clarity and improve translatability.

Doesn’t the use of syntactic cues increase the word count, leading to increased translation costs?
Not necessarily. In my book, I emphasize that authors and editors should think about content reduction at the same time that they are applying the Global English guidelines. In my own writing and editing, I find that I eliminate at least as many words as I insert, even when I am focusing only on sentences and paragraphs and not looking for entire topics that could be eliminated. So in the end, there is an overall decrease in localizable content.

Even if that were not the case, clarity and disambiguation are essential for producing quality translation. If you sacrifice clarity by eliminating syntactic cues, you might increase localization costs by forcing translators to seek clarification on unclear phrases and terminology. In addition, your risk of having incorrectly translated information in your deliverables increases, with potentially disastrous and expensive consequences.

What role does language technology play in this process?
As I was writing the book, acrocheck™ software was an invaluable research tool for collecting and analyzing examples of linguistic patterns. We are also using acrocheck at SAS to help our writers and editors follow our terminology guidelines and style guidelines, including many of the Global English guidelines. I’m an absolute believer that this type of technology should be used more widely. No writer or editor can keep extensive style guidelines and preferred terminology lists in mind while working on a document. Software such as acrocheck is far more efficient for this. Our writers and editors follow our guidelines much more consistently than they could if they had to look up rules or terminology lists online or on paper.

What kind of metrics have you used to quantify the benefits of using language technology or of following the Global English guidelines?
We have not found a need to try to measure the benefits of using acrocheck or of following the Global English guidelines. For anyone who uses this type of language technology and who reads the guidelines and examples in my book, the benefits are intuitively obvious. Everyone in our Documentation Division recognizes the importance of our guidelines, and our writers and editors are happy to have a tool that helps them follow those guidelines.

The documentation process is more efficient because writers fix many of the errors in their documents before turning those documents over to editors. Editors can focus more on content reduction and on other issues that decrease costs and that add greater value to our documentation.

Your book includes 49 major style guidelines, plus dozens of other guidelines for punctuation, capitalization, and terminology. If you had to narrow those down to only ONE, what would be the most important guideline you’d like to see companies use in their authoring?
The in-house translators at SAS once told me that “Limit the length of sentences” was the most important guideline. That guideline is certainly important, but not all long sentences are difficult to translate. So, personally, my favorite guideline is “Make each sentence syntactically and semantically complete.” The book contains several more-specific guidelines about how to do that, but here is one example:

Not Global English:
Space is tracked and reused according to the REUSE value when the file was created, not when you add and delete records.

Global English:
Space is tracked and reused according to the REUSE value that was in effect when the file was created, not according to the REUSE value that is in effect when you add and delete records.

In order to translate the first version of the sentence, a translator has to read between the lines and has to have a very good understanding of the context and subject matter. The translator essentially has to rewrite the sentence as I did in the revised version, supplying the missing content, in order to translate it. Translators should not have to compensate for authors who don’t express their ideas completely!

Thanks, John!