RE: Appalling English

[Robert -dot- Partridge -at- MONDEX -dot- com]

Just a side-note to your excellent perspective...

I used to work for a large company in the UK that bought consumer
electronics from the Far East and rebranded them with various well-known
names. I was in sole charge of writing the instruction manuals. Now there
was a firefighting job. Typically I could be working on 30 products at a
time, ranging from microwaves, tvs and videos, to alarms clocks, kettles and
toasters.

I received the not-quite-ready-yet product from the test department, as well
as the 'Chingrish' text of the operators manual. Generally these
manufacturer's manuals were of such little value that I started from
scratch. I'd sit down with the product and try to figure out how it worked.
Given I had such little time for each product, I relied on the uniformity of
operation of the products. After a short while in that industry you see how
few designs there are for videos, tvs, radios, etc.

What surprised me most, however, was that before I joined the company, one
of the test engineers had the role of sorting out the instruction manual.
They would receive a fax copy of the manual in the morning, hand-write a few
corrections for the worst of the mistakes, and fax it back that evening. No
final proof, no quality control. Of course, often the corrections were
either ignored or more mistakes were made in interpreting the corrections.
And the company was perfectly happy with that situation! In fact, I often
had to explain to my manager why it took me several days to write an
instruction book, when it used to be done in at most an hour. No wonder
there were so many poor instruction manuals in the market! 

It was a very interesting field, and it certainly opened my eyes on that
industry, but in the end I just burnt out.

Rob

Robert Partridge
Technical Author

Tel: +44 (0)20 7557 5098
Fax: +44 (0)20 7557 5298
Email: robert -dot- partridge -at- mondex -dot- com


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