atw: Re: Censoring humour in translation (STIR)

On  9/12/08 11:45 AM, Peter Martin wrote:


The trouble with this is that I find some perfectly straight forward, 
non-humorous and otherwise
apparently inoffensive material in some manuals is taken to be "stupid and 
distracting" by some
reviewers.     For example, from some readers / reviewers I've had in the past, 
I've had similar
comments about sections which contained a simplified overview of the topic. 
These readers
didn't want overview material, or thought it was unnecessary, stupid and 
distracting, that it led to
repetition or "over-simplification", and should be just cut out.   This is just 
one section of the readership.
(After a while, I think I learnt how to pick which people would say this.)

Others thought having the overview was the best feature of the new / revised 
document.

So where does that leave us ?     If this happens without humour, why worry 
about it happening with humour ?



Because those readers can skip the overview material and go to
the main text. However, readers of the main text that includes
humor that they find distracting, annoying, or offensive can't
go to alternate text that doesn't include the humor.

Also, items that are boring are not as personally distracting
or disturbing as items that actively cause a reaction such as
disdain or cultural confusion or offense. One joke that a reader
finds stupid or distracting can undermine their opinion of the
rest of the text, whereas a boring introduction or diagram that
an individual might find unnecessary is not going to invoke the
same emotional reaction to the rest of the text imho.



Idiot's Guides are largely aimed at a non-technical audience and are also not 
the
official documentation from the product manufacturers. For both those reasons, 
they can
get away with a lighter touch. Just to prove the point, I know several people 
who are
disdainful of the Idiot's Guides for this very reason.


Not me. Sorry, but their behaviour sounds a bit like snobbery to me. I considered myself 
a part of the "technical" audience
way back when the DOS book came out (after all, I'd handled CP/M, and cut some 
assembler code by then) and I was grateful as hell
for the assistance it gave compared with the turgid boring-as-batshit, badly 
organised, badly indexed first-cut MicroSoft documentation.

If it works, it works.   And a lot of the so-called "official" product 
documentation still doesn't work.  Possibly for similar reasons: inflexibility and 
formulaic approaches to documentation.  Not a grain of humanity to be seen.



This is precisely the problem with your basic premise: you assume that
*your* evaluation of an approach, such as humor or the Idiot's Guides,
must of course be shared by your audience as well. Just because some
people find the Idiot's Guides approach to be inane and distracting
doesn't mean they're snobs, it means that the approach used by the
guides doesn't work for them. For commercial books, that's fine: not
everyone has to buy every book on a subject. But for documentation that
is provided by the manufacturer with the product, the user doesn't have
a choice of approaches, so it's safest and most effective to provide
straightforward text.



I know humour works in a classroom dealing with technical subjects.    It works 
if you record the classroom lecture
and use it for replay. Don't see why the act of then transcribing that to text 
can't work reasonably well as though it's
suddenly changed in "quality".



Because as someone mentioned about stand-up comedians, they can get
immediate feedback as to whether their audience appreciates the
use of humor at all, or what types of humor are working better
with that particular audience. You can't do that with a written manual.

Senses of humor are extremely personal. You can make reasonably
valid guesses about what level of information to provide to a
user who has a certain amount of experience with your product,
or with similar products, or with the programming language
used by your product. However, there's no way to reasonably
guess what things the vast array of users are likely to find
funny based on a product profile.

-- Janice

***********************************************************
Janice Gelb          | The only connection Sun has with
janice.gelb@xxxxxxx  | this message is the return address



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