I once had a customer say "PLEASE DON'T translate your manuals. We are used to technical materials in English and know what they mean. If you translate it into [French? German? I don't recall] we will have no idea what you are trying to say."
Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Westerman Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2017 5:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Researching Destination z article on non-US mainframes Actually, even with the foreign sites, I believe that most of them elect to not run the translated messages options. I don't normally go to the sites (actually I never go there), but it seems to me in the meetings that (at least the people I deal with) seem to speak English as well (or better) than I do. In fact, they seem to take it as high praise if I should mention it. The few discussions I have had about the subject are that it's no harder to learn English for manual reading than any other language. I have been told that having the manuals in digital format makes it VERY easy to cut and paste the text into their translation program of choice. It's only the English idioms and jokes that give them problems, and IBM books are any BUT funny. The decline in alternate language options though (at least for messages) seems to be more because of lack of desire on the part of the sites rather than the vendors not creating the option(s). Our automation products used to have the option of (I think) 12 languages for the messages and manuals, but I can't even remember the last time someone asked for a local language message module. With our last two versions we elected to remove most of the messages (almost) completely. I think we still might have some translated manuals, but that's about it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
