View from the Other Side...the other side of birds, Manchester, and language  

by Nancy Halverson, Feature Writer

Well, it's time again for another installment. You'll be happy to hear that the flowers are blooming — we're fully into daffodil season, the crocus season has ended, and the trees are starting to show that wonderful green film that means their leaves are coming out soon.

For the Birds

I don't think there are as many birds in Canada as there are here — or at least not in the early spring (well, that makes sense actually). As the sun appears earlier each morning, the birds wake us all up. It's actually a bit of a problem; nearly everyone I talk to is tired this time of year, and most are saying that the birds are waking them — or their children — up at 5 a.m. It's just one of those modern man conflicts with the predictable nature — can't do anything about it, but at the same time, we can't bring ourselves to say it's actually enjoyable either. There just aren't that many morning people I guess (me included).

My daughter, the animal encyclopedia, loves the variety of birds around. She happily names each bird she spots and tells us all about its habitat, and can give us a blow by blow of the various rituals they perform. She's still only 10, but she knows a mating dance of the bird variety when she sees one!

One-Day Seminar

We had a fabulous meeting earlier in March of the STC-UK "Northern" group. My input was minimal, but Nick Rosenthal organized one of the best one-day events I've been to. He runs a translation/localization company in Manchester, and brought speakers out to discuss various aspects of technical writing for a global audience. We heard:

• one writer's experiences creating a single-source process for his company.
• Simplified Technical English — used mainly in the Aerospace industry to control the usage of English so non-English-as-a-first language speakers have a clear understanding of airplanes. This was full of good practices for using consistent English to cut down on translation costs.
• Nick's excellent talk on getting graphics into documents that are being translated (he'll be giving this talk at the May STC conference in Seattle as well).
• A mind-expanding talk about the use of XML in the localization process. 

The day never lagged, and the thirty of us who were in the audience all left with heads buzzing. I'm just at the stage of developing my company's localization plan, and I was so grateful to have had this chance to hear these experiences. There was a good variety of people in the room as well — translators, writers, managers, user-interface people.

Translation

Since the entire day was spent on the idea of global writing, it wasn't as broad an audience as a more general meeting may have attracted, but I felt that the value was there for the people who were interested. In Europe, of course, the idea of translation is often tied closely to our work anyway. As my company's market expands, more attention needs to be paid to creating easily localized documents — not just in European languages, but into Asian languages, as well as Russian and Arabic. Luckily, I'll have developed a documentation process that should allow easy translation and formatting. This conference gave me so many ideas and good information; I could hardly wait to get into work on Monday to get started. (Okay, sad I know, but you've got to find fun wherever you can!)

All in the Family

Oh, and a little bit of travelogue. The conference was in Manchester, in a newly revitalized area that had been at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. I decided to take the family, since the only parts of Manchester that we'd seen were the routes to the airport. Ryan and the girls spent the day in the Museum of Science and Industry — which was right across the street from the conference venue. They had a blast learning about how the children of the 18th century had to work and die in the cotton mills and other factories of the area. Kids love to hear about children's lives, even when they were miserable ones. 

I wanted to spend more time doing some sight-seeing around town, so we'll probably take at least another weekend there. Ryan and I are often jaded about big cities — you've seen one, you've seen 'em all attitude. But Manchester surprised me — from what I've seen of it, there's a good balance between old and new, and they seem to be restoring buildings for modern uses in ways that complement their planning, rather than taking some old relic of a building and creating something that no one can use (as often seems to happen).

One Language, Two Meanings

I've been promising some English verbiage for your interest. I'm staying away from the obvious like boot for trunk and bonnet for hood (of a car) 'cause I figure that most people know those.

That's it for now. this isn't a complete list of all the different words that have either meant something else to me, or new words that I've never encountered before. There's lots out there — like I say, any country that uses the English language develops its own usages. I'm just trying to collect them out of interest. Enjoy!

About Nancy Halverson

Nancy grew up in Toronto, but has lived in Ottawa, Melbourne, Waterloo, and now Sheffield. She has travelled through the South Pacific, Australia and Indonesia, which is where she met her husband, Ryan Wilson (another Canadian), along the way.

A career switch introduced her to the STC in 1997. Her writing experience has included several contract positions and a position at Inscriber for several years. She has two daughters and has been living in England for two years.