Re: Appalling English -Sorry for the garble

[Yosuke Ichikawa <ichikawayosuke -at- obun -dot- co -dot- jp>]

I'm very sorry that my previous post had unreadable characters.

I made the mistake of writing in a Japanese text editor and pasting. The 
basic alphabet letters are okay, but the quotes and apostrophes turn out 
garbled, since they are assigned a different code.

Sorry, too, for the late response, especially those of you who wrote me 
directly to kindly remind me of this problem. I sent the message just 
before I got off work Friday night, and I didn't see your responses until a 
few hours ago, this Monday morning.

And thank you _so_ much Chris Musser for your trouble of fixing my text and 
reposting!!!
(Please tell me what I might be able to do in return.)

I won't waste bandwidth by reposting again myself, but if anyone still 
wants it, please write me directly.


***************

In response to Robert Partridge's post, "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! ":

In our case, clients are really concerned not to deliver an _incorrect_ 
manual, which would be the worst case. They have an independent quality 
controls section to check if the product actually behaves _exactly_ the way 
described in the manual. If say an illustration shows one indicator in the 
LCD lit up where it really doesn't, I would--deservedly-- have to correct 
it.

But they're far less enthusiastic in improving the quality of English 
writing, especially when the manual is based on existing older manuals, 
complete with translations in ten or more languages, since the change would 
mean a revision in English and all translated languages, for this and other 
similar models. (In this respect, it's really important to get it right on 
the relatively few occasion when a manual is made completely from scratch, 
since it will be used for other future models in the series).

A lot of times, the section in charge of the manuals seems not to have a 
strong position themselves within the company. Manuals are not necessarily 
high in the company's list of proirities. They want to provide their 
products with as many catchy features at the lowest profitable price; these 
are, understandably, what sells the product, at least in the immediate 
sense, and, in their view, the manual is almost something they reluctantly 
have to include. (I still believe that badly written manuals would harm 
their reputation, but they're worried about the immediate sales figures). 
Thus the manual section work under great cost-reduction pressure ( except 
perhaps in a few very successful companies, which my current main client 
certainly is not one of).

Plus, they can't tell the quality of English writing themselves--as I've 
repeated in my previous post--so they tend to settle with "well, at least 
it doesn't say anything wrong". I imagine I'll be tempted to react the same 
way, if for example I was in charge of making the Hungarian or Arabic 
manual--languages I'm clueless to--and just when I thought everything was 
done, someone comes up to say that, while the manual may not be "incorrect" 
as such, its language is odd and can use a lot of improvement.

From what I read in this list, as a technological solution, translation 
memory software, in combination with perhaps FrameMaker, seems to be great 
for reusing bits and parts of manuals, achieving consistency among 
different models and cutting/reducing new translation costs by reuse. I've 
been wanting to look into this for some time but haven't had the time to 
experiment.

Thanks for reading.

Yosuke Ichikawa
Obun Printing

P.S. I've been wondering what is the origin of your English (American?) 
expression "my 2 cents" to mean the contibution of your opinion. Does it 
perhaps have a Christian background, where perhaps one is asked to donate 2 
% of your income to charity? (This is a wild guess, and I don't mean to 
offend anyone.)

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