So my mom worked as an educational consultant for HP (AKA translating Engineer into Normal Human) and part of her job was working with the overseas translators to make sure everything said approximately the same thing and that all the languages fit on the documentation. And that said documentation looked pretty enough for marketing. marketing would always get real pissy if there was leftover margin space at the end of the instructions, which is to say, One Guy Named Carl would get real pissy over ‘wasted space’ and because they happened to work in the same building, he’d always come bitch to my mother.
For like, an hour.
Eventually, Mom realized that while English, French and nearly all the other languages took up the same amount of space, German always took up 20% more space and Japanese about 20% less. If she included both languages at the end of any documentation, they’d fill up the margin space *perfectly*. So she just started including both languages, regardless of whether or not that documentation would be distributed to Germany or Japan, just so she could fill up the margin space and also Mrs. Yamada at the Kyoto office needed the extra hours.
Carl, who only sort of paid attention to his work, told her he was very pleased that there was no more “wasted paper” despite the fact that most of the documentation was about 20% longer now.
Eventually, all the other documentation coordination people noticed mom’s practice and started including German and Japanese, and started doing it too. Then the inclusion of both languages became Official Documentation. Then it became Standard Practice for HP and any firms it worked with. Then it became the Industry Standard across Silicon Valley. If you open up the user manual on a new computer these days, you’ll often find German and Japanese, right at the end, because it’s a semi-official practice now.
…some 20 years after my mom started this, my fiance got a high school German assignment to translate a piece of formal writing, and he chose the documentation for his new HP laptop. He had fun with that assignment, and it encouraged him to stay in German, eventually travel overseas, and when he met me, we had a lovely conversation in German and I decided he was worth going out with.
Thank you Mom, for finding a way around Carl’s bullshit, and me my husband.
