Localization and writing for the international market

The number of technical products has rapidly increased over the last decades. This brought along a greater number of user manuals and the need for technical documentation is still not satisfied. But the quantity of technical documentation is not the only aspect; increasingly the quality of technical documentation is gaining focus. In particular companies from the US are worried about wrong usage of and potential damage to their products, or even worse, injury to the users resulting from poor instructions.

Text by Melanie Siegel Andrew Bredenkamp

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Localization and writing for the international market

In addition, the US faced the problem, that more and more technical products were purchased by users who were not native English speakers. This led to the development of a controlled simplified technical English that would make it easier for native and non-native readers to understand instructional text.

High-technology products are usually operated by people with a good demand of the English language, thus vendors need to provide well-written high quality controlled English documentation. For consumer products, however, documentation has to be provided in the reader’s native language. Nevertheless, there are cases in which technical writers (e.g. while preparing translations) have to write documentation in English, although it is not their native language. And, even if they write in their native language, they have to keep the translation process in mind.

Writing for the international ...