Choosing the right word: Guidelines for our global audience?

[Geoff Hart]

Kate Wilcox wondered: <<I've always loved Mark Twain's advice to "use  
the right word and not its second cousin." But now that I'm working  
for a company with a distributed workforce (writers in the US and  
India) and a global audience, I'm starting to question which words  
are right.>>

As you should. I spend a lot of time figuring out how to spot  
problems in my own writing for an international audience, and fail  
about as often as I succeed. It's a question of paying attention to  
how others speak and the words they use, and learning to follow those  
patterns instead of the ones we fall into by reflex after 20, 40, or  
more years of following those patterns -- not an easy habit to break.  
Think of it as learning another language and you won't be far wrong,  
with the additional complication is that dialects such as Indian  
English are close enough to the North American dialect that they  
mislead us into assuming we're speaking the same language. That's  
_almost_ true, and it's the "almost" that gets us in trouble.

With some persistence, you can find glossaries that translate (say)  
American into British, but do you really have the time to run all  
your communication through an idiom checker? Probably not.

The best advice I can give you is to find a colleague in the second  
country (here, India) who can provide reliable advice, and pay close  
attention to their advice until you've learned the most common tricks  
and traps. Think of this as an exercise in localization, and you'll  
get the picture: generally, the best candidate to do the localization  
work is someone immersed in that culture. With lots of hard work, you  
can get good enough to do a credible job, but to do a great job,  
you'll need either a gift for the language and culture, more practice  
than you have time to put in, or someone who's a native in that  
culture if you want to succeed*.

* Most professional translators, when pressed, admit that they can't  
speak their second language like a native. The ones I've talked to  
(quite a few, over the years) grudgingly admit that they're good  
enough to fool someone who isn't paying close attention, and several  
top notch translators told me they only knew a few colleagues who  
were even that good. So it's possible to master a second dialect this  
well, but relatively rare to become sufficiently fluent you'll fool a  
native. Note that "few" and "relative" don't mean that these people  
can't be found, just that they're a small proportion of the total.


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-- Geoff Hart
ghart at videotron.ca / geoffhart at mac.com
www.geoff-hart.com
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