Writing for an International Audience, Part I
If you're not currently engaged in doing business internationally, you probably will be. And if no one in your organization comes from another country or a culture other than what is sometimes termed "mainstream American" (whatever that is!), you're in a very unusual situation.
The fact is that the people we communicate with are more diverse in every way than used to be the case. That diversity affects the choices we need to make if we want to communicate clearly and effectively. This column will discuss some broad areas where the cultural background of your audience has to be considered. Part II will consider some writing strategies for helping your readers who might have learned English as a second language.
Analogies/Examples- A good communicator often uses analogies and examples to explain new information to a reader or listener. However, this strategy doesn't work if your audience is not familiar with the subject of your example. For example, I once saw a software manual that related learning how to use the software to scrimmaging in football, and told the user that taking the tutorial would ensure that the user would be able to "run the play into the endzone" when actually using the software. This might encourage North American users who are familiar with the language of football, but would not communicate very much to users in other countries who don't know what "scrimmage" or "endzone" mean. Similarly, one translator related a problem with a software manual that used an analogy to aerobics classes at a fitness center to explain how the software worked. When translated into other languages, this analogy --and the illustrations that accompanied it -- became meaningless in countries where fitness centers are unknown.
It is sometimes difficult to predict what our audience will understand. In a writing contest for high school students in the city where I live, we once chose as a writing prompt a picture of a farmer shearing a sheep. We did not anticipate that our urban students would have no idea what the farmer was doing -- most wrote essays about how the farmer was "torturing" and "killing" the sheep!
Persuasive Messages- Much of what we write in business is intended to be persuasive, whether we are persuading employees to follow a company policy, persuading a superior to give us the resources we need, or persuading a client to hire us or buy our products. In American business, we tend to think that the "bottom line" -- that is, the costs and other financial considerations--is the most compelling piece of evidence. That is because our business enterprises are heavily oriented toward profit making. That is not always the case in other cultures, however. A good example is the case of an American engineering company that bid on a contract to build an oil refinery in Venezuela a number of years ago. The American firm worked up a written proposal that they thought reflected excellent value for the price they would charge. But they were not awarded the contract. When they asked why, the Venezuelans responded that the French firm that got the contract had been making personal visits for years, bringing their families, and engaging in social activities long before there was any question of a contract. The Venezuelans felt that they knew the management of the French firm well, and could trust them. They were unwilling to invest as much trust in an anonymous American firm.
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