The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market [Perfect Paperback]

SAS Publishing (Author), John Kohl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2008

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 topics: 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 howlanguage 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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"John R. Kohl's masterpiece, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, translatable Documentation for a Global Market, is an indispensable and thoroughly usable set of recommendations and examples. By implementing the appropriate suggestions, every technical writer can now create translatable text that can be better understood by humans and better processed by machines. Terrific work." --Leif Sonstenes, Director Sales and Marketing, Locatech GmbH

"This guide is essential for anyone who creates technical content for global audiences. John Kohl has developed a resource that should be required reading for any manager, technical communicator, or editor involved with content that will be translated for or read by international audiences. As a technical communicator working overseas, I have spent dozens of hours creating guidance for writers who develop global content. With the publication of this book, I now have a thorough, go-to reference that covers all the issues of developing global content that the other style guides do not. This text will be put to use immediately to help my writers create and improve content for translation and publication throughout the world." --Eddie Hollon, Technical Communicator,Hansem EZUserGuides, Inc

"I was very excited when I was approached to review The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. I was even more excited when it arrived and lived up to my hopes. The guide is both comprehensive and succinct, and best of all, is full of practical examples showing text before and after it has been disambiguated. That means there finally is the definitive resource that has been lacking in the field of writing and editing for an international audience." --Wendalyn Nichols, Editor of Copyediting newsletter and editorial trainer

About the Author

John R. Kohl has worked at SAS Institute as a technical writer, technical editor, and linguistic engineer since 1992. For the past several years, John has devoted much of his time to terminology issues and to refining the Global English guidelines. As a linguistic engineer, John customizes and supports tools and processes that help make SAS documentation more consistent, easier to translate, and easier for non-native speakers of English to understand. John has been interested in machine translation and other language technologies for many years, and he is a charter member of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: SAS Press; 1 edition (April 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1599946572
• ISBN-13: 978-1599946573
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Global English Style Guide, May 14, 2008

By 

Daniel D. (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market (Perfect Paperback)

My copy of "The Global English Style Guide" arrived last week. As soon as I began looking through it, I realized this is a book that Technical Communicators have long needed.

There has been a multitude of excellent articles and references dealing with writing English for localization. But I have never found a concise compilation of guidelines and explanations on writing Global English in a handy book format, until now. Kohl's book is well researched, easy to understand, has multiple entry points, and was written by somebody who knows the topic thoroughly.

If you write any kind of material in the English language that will be localized into another language, I recommend that you purchase Khol's book, read it, follow its advice, and keep the book handy on your shelf.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful guide to writing English for a global audience., July 28, 2008

By 

Timohuatl (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market (Perfect Paperback)

John R. Kohl's Global English Style Guide is a very useful resource for understanding the importance and practice of writing English for a global audience. In fact, it provides an exciting and passionate case for the value of language in technical documentation. The first chapter outlines the impact of Global English on costs, quality, and usability. It also examines the growing impact of machine translation. The rest of the book consists of a rich set of guidelines to follow. The most valuable part of the book, though, is the focus on before and after examples of sentences followed by discussions of why one solution is better than another. My only frustration with the book is that it does not serve well as a quick reference, which is what I would normally expect from a style guide. However, if I have to chose, I would much prefer to engage in the logic of the author's recommendations rather than just a prescriptive list of do's and don'ts.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Global English Style Guide: a review, November 21, 2008

By 

Mike Unwalla (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market (Perfect Paperback)

Many people who do not speak English as a first language struggle to understand English texts. Human translation is expensive. Machine translation frequently does not work. Global English offers a solution to these three related problems.

Many good style guides exist. Why do technical writers need another style guide? Unlike other style guides, this book covers grammatical structures, not only particular terms. The author writes clearly, and he explains the reasons for the guidelines. The book is not an academic paper. The guidelines are based on practical work at SAS Institute, where the author works.

Most technical writers know some of the guidelines already. For example, restrict the use of the passive voice, use language literally, and simplify the writing style. However, many guidelines may be new to some technical writers.

Both of the following sentences are grammatically correct:
* Set up the system.
* Set the system up.

Now, as far as possible, I always use the first structure, and keep the parts of a phrasal verb together. Keeping the parts of the verb together increases consistency, improves machine translation, and helps non-native speakers who do not know the particular verb.

The subtitle of the book refers to writing documentation. However, most of the guidelines apply to copywriting as much as to technical writing. All writers who want to reach a global audience, to decrease translation costs, or to make their texts as clear as possible will benefit highly from this book.