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Five top tips: writing for a global audience

Posted by Catie Holdridge

English is, to quote The Economist, the language of global business. You may feel you already have many of the secrets of better business writing at your fingertips, but writing for a global audience can require a new set of rules. Here are five top tips for communication skills that travel well.

1. Make sure your grammar is accurate
Like most foreign-language training, ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) teaching focuses quite heavily on grammar. In fact, it’s not unusual to find that ESOL students have a better grasp of grammar than many UK graduates. So if your writing is ungrammatical, it will be especially baffling or misleading for your readers. They may read grammatical mistakes as deliberate (and confusing) choices, and they will lack the familiarity with common language patterns to work out what you actually meant.

2. Use short sentences
The longer the sentence, the more likely it is that your reader will lose the gist of it. Long sentences tend to have more complex structures and dependent clauses, which can make the main point hard to work out. They will also look intimidating to non-native speakers. If you have long sentences, try splitting them up so that each is no more than 20 words.

3. Limit abstract nouns
An abstract noun is a word that refers to an event, state, quality, concept or feeling: essentially it’s a thing that doesn’t exist physically, eg meeting, consideration, anger, freedom, research, problem and so on. You won’t be able to get rid of them completely, but try not to have too many in each sentence.

Before:
The outcome of the meeting was an agreement to commission research into the subject of Spanish culture to allow for predictions of potential problems.

After:
During the meeting, we agreed to research Spanish culture so we can predict any possible problems.
By turning many of the abstract nouns into verbs (eg ‘predictions’ to ‘predict’) and rewording to eliminate others, you get a more manageable, and much shorter, sentence.

4. Be careful with modal (or ‘helping’) verbs
The main helping or modal verbs are ‘shall’ and ‘should’, ‘will’ and ‘would’, ‘may’ and ‘might’, ‘can’ and ‘could’, and ‘must’. They show how the main verb is meant to be read, and are used very naturally by native speakers. Consider the difference between being told you ‘could’ finish your report by the end of the day (where the main verb is ‘finish’), or that you ‘must’ finish it by the end of the day.
However, they are not as clear-cut as they first seem, particularly for global readers. Look out for unclear sentiments. (The potential problem will be obvious to anyone who’s asked the question ‘Can you make me a cup of tea?’ and received the ever-hilarious answer, ‘Yes, I can’.)

For example, ‘You may leave at 4pm’ could mean ‘you are allowed to leave’ or ‘you might choose to leave’. If you find yourself writing ‘the proposal should be submitted on Tuesday morning’, think whether you mean you expect it to be delivered then, or that it absolutely must be.

5. Avoid negatives
Questions phrased in the negative, like ‘You don’t have the research results, do you?’ are harder to follow and could provoke the opposite response than was intended out of confusion. Be straightforward: ‘Do you have the research results?’.

Double negatives are also problematic. Whereas in English they equal a positive, in some languages (including Spanish) they merely emphasise the negative aspect. We read ‘not unlikely’ as ‘likely’; but a Spanish reader, for example, would probably understand it as ‘very unlikely’.

In some cultures, such as Japanese, the word ‘no’ is habitually avoided. Others don’t even have a translatable version of it. Yet others view negative language as insulting.

As with any writing, it’s vital to know your audience before you begin.

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Posted May 13th, 2011 in International issues | No Comments »

Idioms don’t travel well

Posted by Catie Holdridge

When writing anything for a global audience, it’s best to leave idioms out of it.

Idioms are groups of words whose meaning is usually metaphorical and cannot necessarily be deduced from looking at each component word. Unsurprisingly, this can make them problematic for anyone who may be attempting to translate word by word. What might you make of these turns of phrase?

Spanish: I have an aunt who plays the guitar. (Yo tengo una tía que toca la guitarra.)
French: It’s the end of the beans! (C’est la fin des haricots!)
Arabic: The sky doesn’t throw chicks. (El samaa la tohadef katakeet.)
Spanish: To leave Guatemala and arrive in worse cornstalks. (Salir de Guatemala y meterse en guatepeor.)

[You’ll find the answers at the foot of this blog post.]

Talking nonsense

Not that English idioms are any more sensible. On the face of it, there’s no obvious reason why feline nightwear (‘It’s the cat’s pyjamas’, for our readers who speak English as a second language) should indicate the highest of standards. Nor is it clear why a taut top lip (‘Keep a stiff upper lip’) is a desirable feature in the face of adversity.

Every country has its own idioms, which tend to reflect back on the culture they come from. Spend long enough studying translations and you might be able to hazard a guess at the meaning of other countries’ sayings, and sometimes, find the odd crossover.

Spanish: Everyone has their own way to kill fleas. (Cada quien tiene su manera de matar pulgas.)
English: There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
German: From a mosquito make an elephant. (Aus einer Mücke einen Elefanten machen.)
English: Make a mountain out of a molehill.

The question is: do you want or expect your reader to take that time? Can you be sure they won’t dismiss your communication as gibberish rather than work out you don’t want them literally to push an envelope, put a project in their bed or extract something from a horse’s mouth?

Don’t make work for your reader

And much of the time, we don’t even know where our own language’s idioms came from, or why they mean what they do. We use them based on the context we’ve heard them in and out of habit. Little wonder, then, that they so easily trip up international readers.

In the UK, we may talk of ‘taking a rain check’. But how many of us know the expression is borrowed from baseball in the US, where a ‘rain check’ is the receipt from a ticket, which may be reused if rain prevents play?

Let’s get literal

So let’s not beat around the bush. When writing for global audiences, being as literal as possible is the best method by a long chalk. Anything else just won’t cut the mustard.

Answers:
What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?
That’s the last straw!
Money doesn’t grow on trees.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

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Posted April 14th, 2011 in Choose your words wisely, International issues | No Comments »

Jolly good, what? British accents are quite safe

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Patriots and language guardians rejoice: any perceived threat to our mother tongue from pervasive Americanisms – at least as far as our accents are concerned – seems largely without substance.

New research by the British Library has revealed that English pronunciations are standing firm (if not static), despite our ‘special relationship’ with across-the-ponders – and even more special relationship with their television programmes, films and video games. Over 10,000 English speakers around the world have added their voices to an audio map as part of the Library’s exhibition, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices.

The researchers were able to directly compare typical American and British (as well as Irish and European) pronunciations. Volunteers all read out either the same extract from children’s story Mr Tickle or a list of six words which can be pronounced in different ways.

The results showed that there are still many marked differences between speakers in the US and in the UK and Ireland. For example, ‘garage’ is often pronounced by British and Irish to rhyme with ‘marriage’, instead of ‘mirage’. And Americans favour intoning ‘controversy’ with the emphasis on the first syllable, while Brits often land more heavily on the second.

Putting aside the question of whether we actually fear for our language’s purity to the extent the press may sometimes make out, it’s interesting to note that it’s the Brits who are more prone to abandoning standard pronunciations. Meanwhile, the majority of American volunteers opted for versions (like ‘garage’ to rhyme with ‘mirage’, or ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘bone’) given first listings in the Oxford English Dictionary.

As we tend to stress the second syllable of words like ‘controversy’ and ‘harass’, in some ways our great-grandparents would be less accustomed to our intonation than to that of most Americans’. ‘This method of pronunciation will be unfamiliar to an older generation,’ says Jonnie Robinson, curator of sociolinguists at the British Library. ‘British English, for whatever reason, is innovating and changing while American English remains very conservative and traditional in its speech patterns.’

And anyone inclined to do so can probably stop worrying about future generations universally speaking like characters out of Glee. They are much more likely to pick up the habits of the real people in their lives. ‘People are much more influenced by those they interact with than was previously thought,’ says Robinson. ‘They are much more likely to adopt the speech patterns of friends, family and workmates rather than copy what they see in a film or television programme.’

There’s no guarantee they won’t start begging you for singing lessons, though.

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Posted March 29th, 2011 in International issues | No Comments »

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