Are there any non-technical jobs...

[Jan Morén]

tis 2004-10-19 klockan 04:49 -0400 skrev volvoguy:
> On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:13:54 +0800, John <dingo at coco2.arach.net.au> wrote:
> 
> > I think most countries do not follow American practice. I've noticed
> > more likelihood of writings in Debian adopting British spelling.
> 
> I didn't notice that - probably because I'm American. :-) I can see
> how different terminology could be a problem, but I can't imagine the
> spelling differences between British and American would confuse a lot
> of people. Quite often I pass right by those differences without even
> noticing.

There are a number of other differences as well, of course; different
words for the same thing (lorry and truck), but also more subtle
differences in preferred expressions and word order and so on. Then add
Canadian, Australian, Indian, etc. English and you have a huge amount of
variety.

In practice this is unlikely to be a real problem in the online
documentation. Arguably, as long as people keep the same terminology and
are reasonably consistent with spelling within one document it will be
fine. With a number of authors it is all but impossible to create one
voice in any case.

For printed/compiled documentation it might be beneficial to go over it
all and make it self-consistent, but for the online stuff I doubt it is
really worth the trouble to try.


> > A couple of things crossed my mind. I don't want to distress anyone, but
> > technical writing is a specialist skill in itself.
> 
> Definitely, and as a former technical writer I can vouch for the fact
> that it's a job that isn't much fun. The job from hell actually. :-)

I actually like that sort of thing :) I'm a translator for some
Gnome-related apps (gnumeric and gimp, mainly) to Swedish, and I think
it is an interesting challenge, hovering right in between the technical
and linguistic domains.  



> Yes, actually testing the info that you're writing is very important.
> Not only to make sure that the info is correct, but to make sure it's
> understandable by the largest audience possible. While I don't think
> many people who are computer illiterate would be installing Linux,
> it's good to put yourself in their shoes - what's a sudo? what's
> Synaptic? what's a command prompt? what's a runlevel? etc...

A good foundation for documentation is to actually log, in detail, what
you are doing with your own system. If something seems less than totally
obvious when you look back on it, it may be a good candidate for a
writeup. And since you have a detailed log (both of what worked and what
didn't), you have a good start on accurate documentation as well. You
still need to verify it, of course, but writing something from notes is
still far better than relying on hazy, fallible memory.



-- 
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
 
Tel. (Japan) 090-3622 8920            Dr. Jan Morén (mr)
                                      Dept. of Cognitive Science
http://lucs.lu.se/people/jan.moren    Lund, Sweden