So I’ve been getting this response increasingly more with my Australian localisation projects over the past few years.
Here's an example of what has happened…
I received an important, probing, patient-facing medical survey in US English, which needed to be localised for an Australian audience. The responses from this survey will determine whether treatment has been successful or not, so obtaining accurate information is crucial.
As is often the case, the amount of edits required to make the text as accessible and comprehensible as possible for Australia exceeds what is expected. Most openly say to me that they think localisation of US English texts for Australia will at most involve a word here and there being spelt differently and nothing more.
But localisation, in all cases and not just in this case from US to Australian English, is always more than just spelling. Differences involving the following factors also need to be considered:
- tone
- capitalisation
- punctuation
- tense usage
- grammar
- symbols
- phrases
- vocabulary
- wording
... and connotations, implications, insinuations and associations.
It's all about nuance and subtleties.
Of course, more edits mean more work down the line in terms of formatting and printing, which also means more money needing to be spent. With budgets always being tight, and localisation for Australia often relegated as solely a box-ticking task, "good enough" is far too often exactly that.
There also often a requirement that text be as uniform as possible across different variants and dialects of the same language, which is understandable. However, when the exact same wording in a multicountry language such as English could be read to have a polite tone in one form, but considered pretentious, patronising or outright rude in another, that’s not always possible.
So quite often, I’ve been getting many of my reasoned edits rejected, leaving the Australian text almost indistinguishable from the US English source. That means many terms, items and phrases are left in the text, which a number of Australians either will interpret differently or, in a worse-case scenario, not even understand.
When I've pointed out that a certain term, wording or aspect left in the final version of the text will cause misunderstandings, the response most used of late has been:
“If they don’t understand, they’ll ask.”
That’s all fine and well, and in a perfect world that certainly would be the case.
But before assuming that people would, the bigger question that needs to be asked is “will they though?”
I already have the answer…
In most cases, people won’t ask.
There are many reasons for this. For instance, you have people who are embarrassed to ask, whether because they’re shy or they don’t want to appear, in their minds, stupid. Others might simply not want to nor have the time to ask questions, even when assured they can. For people-pleasers, asking questions can also be seen as being a nuisance and bother, rather than assistance. And that’s only when the respondent acknowledges to themselves there’s something unclear. What’s worse is when the respondent is confident that they do understand everything but based on how they see it, often grounded on their cultural norms and not those on which the source text were based.
In all these cases, rather than asking, they’ll just answer the question using their own interpretation, which can be very different from what is actually being asked. This in turn produces inaccurate and unreliable data, ultimately defeating the purpose of the survey.
Now this is not limited to localisation. Last month I attended an insightful seminar focused on language barriers for people with English as an additional language (EAL) in British legal or judicial settings. One of the main points repeatedly raised at this seminar was the expectation and firm belief of people in the legal profession in the UK that EAL people will simply ask if they don’t understand something. When it comes to legal jargon, even native English speakers have a hard time understanding most of it – and this is more so the case when it comes to people who have another language as their primary one, no matter how good their level of English is or presents. Now, this expectation of asking comes from blindly applying norms acceptable in mainstream British culture, based mainly on an underlying confidence in operating in English, often the only language people in the legal profession in the UK speak.
As pretty much everyone present agreed, most EAL people will not ask questions, and when asked if everything presented to them is clear to them, will invariably say “yes” even if they understood absolutely nothing. I won't go into the reasons why this is frequently the case or whether this is right or wrong; it's just the reality.
One of the main solutions offered to ensure that people have understood is instead of asking them "do you understand?", ask them to repeat in their own words how they understood what has been told to them.
When it comes to written text, though, it’s then best practice to have language optimised from the onset for maximum comprehension rather than rely on the flawed expectation that all possible ambiguities, many of which are avoidable, can be simply solved by leaving the responsibility for the respondent to clarify what is being communicated.
The reason why I make what for the unfamiliar deem a large number of seemingly innocuous and trivial edits when localising text for Australia is to ensure Australians understand the text without having any need to ask questions. The message is conveyed clearly, resulting in respondents giving reliable and accurate information – which means the goal is achieved.
It's actually quite simple: clear communication provides clear results!
Photo by Mikhail Nilov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-signing-documents-8943322/
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