That's very true and it works in the other direction too. We worked on a product that started out in Japan and the manual for it had been translated into English by someone in Japan. It was completely unusable . We had to start over from scratch and rewrite the manual in English.
On Aug 12, 2017 4:39 PM, "Charles Mills" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
