[SystemSafety] Transcending the bounds of sub-literacy

[Olwen Morgan]

A few years ago, I had to supervise the translation of around 100,000 
words of technical documentation from German into English. Two 
translation agencies declined to translate one particular 25,000 word 
user manual document, so I did it myself.

Normally I expect to translate at a rate 2000-2500 words per day. On 
that document, I averaged 850 words a day. It was by far the most 
difficult technical translation I've ever done. Linguists here will 
appreciate that technical German has an impersonal style that often 
defies direct translation into English - typically there is much 
sentence reorganisation to do. In this case things were made worse 
because the original document had been written by an Iranian in 
none-too-succinct German to begin with. Some years earlier, I had a 
similar experience translating a similarly-sized testing manual from 
French into English.

Ironically, one can have almost as much trouble "translating" insuccinct 
technical English into something better. Over the years I have seen many 
items of technical documentation that were appallingly written. Sadly, 
it's very common in s/w engineering.  AFAI can see, the majority of (not 
just) s/w engineers write excruciatingly bad technical English. 
(Translators often complain about it.) Doing this in a critical system's 
requirements specification is akin to shooting yourself in the foot 
before you start a marathon.

There are some things you can do about it. In one company, I recommended 
that engineers use the readability metrics in MS Word. If you kept the 
Flesch-Kincaid grade level no greater than 8 and the Flesch reading ease 
no less than 60%, the results tended to be markedly better than usual. 
Another approach is to follow BS0, which sets out editorial requirements 
for British Standards. Once you're used to it, you can gibber BSI 
English in your sleep.

On the other hand, I suspect that most people who do technical subjects 
at school do so, at least in part, because they are uncomfortable in the 
more touchy-feely area of language. To my mind, it shows in the quality 
of their writing. (Once I even had a deadhick manager ask me to replace 
a sentence in one of my own documents with a construction that contained 
no verb!)

IMO courses in writing clear technical English (or whatever language you 
use) should be mandatory and have to be passed in all engineering 
degrees and equivalent professional training. Forget requirements 
management. With a little discipline, you can produce perfectly 
manageable requirements specifications simply by writing decent English 
into the cells of a spreadsheet - and if you can't, an RM tool is 
limited in what it can do for you.


Having a foggy-headed morning and yet another grumpy-old-woman moan,

Olwen