John R. Kohl

Many books about technical writing will provide you with guidelines on how to make your writing clear, concise and visually effective. This book goes further and provides concrete guidelines on how to resolve ambiguities in your writing and make it easier to translate. In our increasingly globalized world, with more and more English documents requiring translation into other languages, a high-quality source text is crucial. This book provides guidelines, ranked by priority level, that will help you determine what aspects of your writing you need to focus on when writing a text to be translated by human translators, fed through a machine translation system, or read by non-native speakers of English.

The book is very well organized, with clear headings, short sections and a pleasing visual layout. Information is often shown in table or list format, and the author provides abundant real-life examples to illustrate the concepts being discussed. You may disagree with some of the guidelines (for example, I found the author's use of hyphens excessive), but that is why they are called guidelines and not rules.

The author's comments on translation were particularly illuminating. Some of the real-life examples discussed the problems of pronouns with unclear referents, especially "it" and "them", when translating from English into a language where nouns have gender (e.g. French). If there are two possible referents and they have different genders, which does the translator choose? The time spent clarifying this issue is wasted time, especially when multiplied over several translations. Another guideline discussed the elimination of synonyms or variants, mainly to make translation memories and machine translation software more useful. If a term or phrase has several variants, sentences with the variants will be presented as "fuzzy" matches, and the translator will then have to look more closely at them and decide whether to use them. (Of course, the author's translation memory scenarios also assume that the translation memory itself is well maintained; if the sentences in the French and English versions of a document are misaligned, for example, or only one version is uploaded, then the memory will be of no help to the translator.)

The main thing to take away from this book is what the author calls the Cardinal Rule of Global English: "Don't make any change that will sound unnatural to native speakers of English." Basically, the guidelines he presents are a way for you to analyze your writing and ensure that you are saying what you want to say. This is a valid goal even if your writing is not destined for translation.

I would recommend this book if your job description includes writing of any stripe, from extremely technical software manuals to general press releases.… (meer)