atw: Re: Censoring humour in translation (STIR)

Wow, this has proved to be a long discussion.

As someone that writes only English documentation but has another language as 
their first language (Portuguese), please let me give you my opinion.

Humour is very subjective. The other day I wrote an editorial comment to a 
colleague of mine (who happens to be a French Canadian person). I was editing 
the screens of one of our applications and came across this one that had a huge 
(and I mean huge) empty area. I wrote “This screen is a tad too long.” Sounds 
innocuous (it certainly was for me, and we shared a common language base). He 
took offence – in his opinion I was being insulting. On the other hand, if I 
had been speaking to him, this problem would not have happened – he could have 
seen my body language and not taken the comment as serious (just like stand-up 
comedians). 

It goes back to the (in)famous “Where in the bloody hell are you” ad. I found 
it offensive (and I was not alone) and yet many people didn’t – hence they paid 
millions of dollars to send it around the world.

I also remember (many years ago) attending a training course given my a UK 
speaker. He decided to break the ice with a number of jokes. The all Australian 
audience did not even crack a smile. He was clever enough to gauge the audience 
correctly and stop his jokes. In the end, we all went from a groan to a happy 
ending. If the material was written, he would have not been able to change it 
on the fly, and we would have all said that the course was dreadful.

Have fun and enjoy your jokes – I certainly enjoy mine.

Cheers,
Ana 


--- On Mon, 8/12/08, Janice Gelb <Janice.Gelb@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Janice Gelb <Janice.Gelb@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: atw: Re: Censoring humour in translation (STIR)
> To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Received: Monday, 8 December, 2008, 9:30 PM
> 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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