The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable...

Features

• Perfect Paperback: 336 pages
• Published by: SAS Press April 9, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1599946572
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1599946573
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.2 pounds

Product 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

Product Description
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 will not 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.

Reader Reviews
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. Comment | | (Report this)