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Paperback The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market Book

ISBN: 1599946572

ISBN13: 9781599946573

The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market

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Book Overview

The Global English Style Guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. Author John Kohl also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly. Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics: ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent; ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities; how to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand; punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient; and how language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard. This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world. This book is part of the SAS Press program.

Customer Reviews

5 ratings

Great tips for writing for a global market

I taught English in Japan before becoming a medical translator and now a consultant for Japanese Pharma companies. This book is truly useful in helping my clients prepare regulatory documents for international submission. The principles help them write with confidence in English (and to write English that requires less 'fixing"!)

The Global English Style Guide

I have been a technical writer for more than 40 years. Over that time I have developed a style of effective communication that is understood by technical English users at all levels. This book comes closest to documenting that style. Although tuned to writers who prepare material to be translated, it is effective when communicating technical concepts, processes, and procedures.

The Global English Style Guide: a review

Many people who do not speak English as a first language struggle to understand English texts. Human translation is expensive. Machine translation frequently does not work. Global English offers a solution to these three related problems. Many good style guides exist. Why do technical writers need another style guide? Unlike other style guides, this book covers grammatical structures, not only particular terms. The author writes clearly, and he explains the reasons for the guidelines. The book is not an academic paper. The guidelines are based on practical work at SAS Institute, where the author works. Most technical writers know some of the guidelines already. For example, restrict the use of the passive voice, use language literally, and simplify the writing style. However, many guidelines may be new to some technical writers. Both of the following sentences are grammatically correct: * Set up the system. * Set the system up. Now, as far as possible, I always use the first structure, and keep the parts of a phrasal verb together. Keeping the parts of the verb together increases consistency, improves machine translation, and helps non-native speakers who do not know the particular verb. The subtitle of the book refers to writing documentation. However, most of the guidelines apply to copywriting as much as to technical writing. All writers who want to reach a global audience, to decrease translation costs, or to make their texts as clear as possible will benefit highly from this book.

Very useful guide to writing English for a global audience.

John R. Kohl's Global English Style Guide is a very useful resource for understanding the importance and practice of writing English for a global audience. In fact, it provides an exciting and passionate case for the value of language in technical documentation. The first chapter outlines the impact of Global English on costs, quality, and usability. It also examines the growing impact of machine translation. The rest of the book consists of a rich set of guidelines to follow. The most valuable part of the book, though, is the focus on before and after examples of sentences followed by discussions of why one solution is better than another. My only frustration with the book is that it does not serve well as a quick reference, which is what I would normally expect from a style guide. However, if I have to chose, I would much prefer to engage in the logic of the author's recommendations rather than just a prescriptive list of do's and don'ts.

Global English Style Guide

My copy of "The Global English Style Guide" arrived last week. As soon as I began looking through it, I realized this is a book that Technical Communicators have long needed. There has been a multitude of excellent articles and references dealing with writing English for localization. But I have never found a concise compilation of guidelines and explanations on writing Global English in a handy book format, until now. Kohl's book is well researched, easy to understand, has multiple entry points, and was written by somebody who knows the topic thoroughly. If you write any kind of material in the English language that will be localized into another language, I recommend that you purchase Khol's book, read it, follow its advice, and keep the book handy on your shelf.
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