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Christine Pellar-Kosbar wondered: <<I'm trying to make a US English
manual as easy-to-read as possible for a UK audience. I've checked
spelling and grammar, converted units to metric, converted paper sizes
to European, and made sure dates/times are in the appropriate format.
Can you think of anything else I might want to do?>>
If you're not British yourself, or haven't immersed yourself so deeply
in British culture that you automatically think in British, you'd be
well-advised to hire someone typical (i.e., British) from your audience
to provide a rigorous reality check on your efforts. All your hard work
will be repaid by a much easier time for that person, and thus a lower
editing cost, but this isn't a step you should really try to skip.
Though most international audiences have learned to cope with the
idiosyncracies of American English, it's a kindness to your audience to
fully localize documents where this is possible.
Ideally, hire yourself a good British editor. If you need a referral,
send me details and I'll forward your request to the copyediting-l
discussion group so as to find you some British pros who can do the
work for you. Make it quite clear that their primary goal or even their
only goal is to weed out confusing Americanisms and you can further
reduce the cost. Two other notes:
- Metric conversions: Learn from NASA's mistakes and hire a pro to
double-check your conversions. Seemingly small errors can sometimes
have disastrous consequences. There may even be serious legal
repercussions if you fail to do this.
- Dates and times in the appropriate format: There's a pernicious myth
that any standard format exists within a given country; for example,
here in Canada, I've seen every possible variant you can imagine of
[YY]YY/MM/DD for dates, even within a single organization (in my case,
the federal government). Worse yet, different style guides recommend
different formats. The _only_ universally understood way to present a
date is to spell out the month rather than using a number.
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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