About three careers back I was building racks of expensive test & measurement equipment. Some of the signal generators we used were from Japan, and in a couple of cases the users/programmers manuals for them were translated literally from the original Japanese, by someone who quite obviously was NOT technically oriented. It was hilarious.

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Originally posted by MWC:

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Originally posted by mark123:

I don’t really think hiring English majors is the solution considering that English and Journalism majors often write headlines that take me 10 minutes to decipher. I think we just have to learn Moronglish to communicate.

You are absolutely wrong about the English majors; in fact, many English majors are specifically hired to do technical writing. Some even study it as a special concentration.

This reminds me of something that I had completely forgotten. Back in the early 1960s when I worked for Bell Labs, we engineers would write our own documentation, which then went to an editing department as part of the process. The editors were English and Journalism majors.

The part that I had forgotten (this was sixty years ago!), is that I dated one of the Journalism grads who worked in the technical editing group. The dating went as far as a brief engagement. Very brief. It ended during a bridge game, when she threw the ring at me, stood up, reached across the table and slapped me, and then stalked off in a huff. I still miss her late 1950s Chevy; it was a nice car.

How about those Instruction Leaflets that are just drawings with no text ?

They mean nothing to me. The leaflets would be more understandable in Greek. Having problems with both visual acuity and poor visual attention to detail they are useless. I ought to file a discrimination suit and make them write it in plain English.

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Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:

I ought to file a discrimination suit

Hahaha

The consumer software industry has largely solved this problem by providing no manuals or documentation. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Samsung - you just mess around with it until you figure it out.

One time when I worked at Ford there was a debate about the language to put in the owner's manual about the HVAC system in a particular car. I mused that the exact langauge was probably not really important because no one is going to read the thing. And these other engineers were shocked and said "I always read the manual for my car". Yeah, you and like 0.01% of car buyers. I read the maintenance schedule, oil type and quantity, tire pressure recommendation, and that's about it.

In my current job, part of what I do is write technical standards that are applied globally, along with editing and approving others. They are all in English. But the people assigned to write them can be in China, India, UK, or US. I fix all the stuff that is obviously translational, and edit for flow and consistency. The odd sentence structure and word choice people in India use gets tedious sometimes. I also scrub for jargon and idioms that don't translate well.

One Indian I worked with always used the term "lazy susan" when referring to things with a rotating dial top. One time I was in China in Chongqing and the engineer asked me "what does it mean lazy susan?". I said it means rotating top like a Chinese dinner table. He said "why not just call it rotating top?", and he was right. Then there was the time the Indian called a guide fixture - something you put on a part so you can install it or other part with proper alignment and no binding - a "pilot dolly". A what? A dolly is a handcart, not a tool. Chinese call anything with wheels that moves a "trolly". But you get used to it.

But we don't translate thse into other languages due to cost and revision time so users either have to know enough english or someone local to them has to help them translate.

Field service manuals are written by technical writers and are translated into the major languages, but they are not perfect either.

I will say that auto-translation has gotten much better in the past few years. I took a supplier services agreement written in Mandarin and put it through Microsoft document translation in MS Word and while the output was not perfect it was clearly understandable such that I didn't need to do anything else. I suspect this it becoming the norm, but you still have to go and fix things afterwards, which doesn't always happen.

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Originally posted by Mars_Attacks:
I have a technical manual that has "Do not drink vomit" as a warning.

This should be included with all professional drum kits.

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How about those Instruction Leaflets that are just drawings with no text ?

They will sometimes take the phrase "it goes without saying" a little too far. Although I DO like the ones that they show at the beginning of Resident Alien. Well thought out and complete.

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Originally posted by Sig Vicious:
[QUOTE]
How about those Instruction Leaflets that are just drawings with no text ?

They will sometimes take the phrase "it goes without saying" a little too far. Although I DO like the illustrations that they show at the beginning of Resident Alien. Well thought out and complete.