February 2021
Juggling your business requirements Part 2
Juggling your business requirements using documentation standards, and why Simplified English matters?
Juggling your business requirements Part 1
How does Simplified English potentially help us to achieve high-quality product standards, and why for starters do we need Simplified English? Well, Simplified English consists of two words: Simplified and English. So for starters, why is it English? There are three times as many native speakers of Mandarin Chinese as there are native speakers of English. However, Mandarin Chinese doesn’t get us very far outside east Asia. So English is a much better choice because it is actually the language that has the highest penetration into other continents. It is spoken in all continents, but the vast majority of people has English as a second, rather than the first language. English is a very global language. We can find English speakers in almost every country, but their understanding of English could be different from ours and may actually be limited.
Language is a means to communicate the information that we have to present to our users, to our audience.
And English happens to be a very rich language, meaning that, amongst other things, it has a huge vocabulary. It has about three times as many words as French or German. However, in French or German, you can say just the same things that you can say in English. You can express the same thoughts as accurately as in English. So this implies actually that English has redundant or ambiguous words. There are too many words with the same or very similar meanings. Also, English grammar is a problem even for most native English speakers, and it can be highly confusing especially to people with English as a second language, or who have limited education. So we want to try and do away with this huge, unnecessary part of the vocabulary and we want to simplify grammar to what is essential to getting our message across.
We are not here to show off our literary skills, we are not writing poetry, we are not writing literature, it’s not about Shakespeare, it’s about informing your audience, the user.
After all, we are not here to show off our literary skills, we are not writing poetry, we are not writing literature, it’s not about Shakespeare, it’s about informing your audience, the user, whether he is a consumer or engineer, a maintenance technician, staff in a hospital. It doesn’t matter whom we are talking to, but if we have a message for them, it should really go without saying that we want to be understood, and language should never be an obstacle. Language is a means to communicate the information that we have to present to our users, to our audience.
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