As a participant in an international project with zero budget for translation, I can attest that there is another variety of English out there which one might call “chaotic English.” In our case my colleagues consist of Americans like me who wouldn’t have a clue how to write British English and continental Europeans who mostly grew up with British spellings in the classroom and American pop culture outside it. We do the best we can but at times we literally have “program” and “programme” in the same document. Give me a €250k editorial budget and I’ll straighten it right out.

I think this conversation is hampered by a confusion between descriptivist and prescriptivist points of view. Gary Lefman’s search for an “authoritative” definition is in my opinion pointless, since unlike the academies which govern French and Spanish, English has no authoritative body to make such decisions. In my personal opinion that’s a good thing, because I don’t see how the speakers of French or Spanish (particularly not those from Montreal, Mauritius, Mexico or Montevideo) have ever benefitted from such an authority, but maybe that’s just my postcolonial bias.

I do agree that there are many Englishes, not just two. How many one chooses to translate into should be a practical decision, not a political one. It may be that in contexts where the primary goal is to convey factual information, even one target English is sufficient provided that one avoids a few linguistic landmines and pays sufficient attention to localization issues that go beyond the linguistic (e.g., laws, governmental institutions and which side of the road to drive on). On the other hand, where affective engagement with the material is the primary concern — i.e., in marketing — one might need a dozen or more Englishes for global coverage.

In addition, US × UK goes far beyond the “color × colour” issue.

Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and Windows Live offer both UK and US English!

Several other languages come to mind for which varieties play an important role: Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Chinese (traditional, simplified) Norwegian (Nynorsk and Bokmål) and Spanish (Spain, Latin America).

As more and more websites become multilingual, these varieties will often be supported. Users like to have a choice!

And it’s not like English in England is the same as it was 400 years ago, either. It’s just as much a bastardization (with a purposeful z) as the language spoken in the US. It is not as though thou still speakest with the second-person singular pronoun.

http://languageicon.org/

It’s hard to find the right balance between accommodating as many audiences as possible (and enjoying SEO benefits/visibility) vs. what it costs to do so. It’s the age-old question of ROI.

Great thread (and welcome to Redmond, John!) -
Jen Hofer, Lionbridge

Congrats on the new job too!

Best,
Andres

I’ve even been toying with the idea of doing a translation into “Australian” for our .com.au domain, but I’m not familiar enough with Australian English to determine if it makes sense to do this.

American readers, who form the largest English speaking audience for most companies, will find their reading disrupted as the British spellings will be far more noticeable to them.

There is probably something here in that websites, primary used as marketing tools, want to present themselves as having empathy and something in common with their audience.

That doesn’t make it right! Just my opinion on this trend.

Questions:

Why do you say there is a trend towards American English?

Has someone done research on this? Or is this a personal observation?

I’d love to know.

That said, I did see a vending machine here in Japan that had been localised to a very fine level:
- Japanese
- English
- Chinese
- Korean
- Spanish
- Kansai-ben*

*Kansai-ben is the local dialect. It is a bit like offering ‘Scouse’ or ‘Brooklyn’ as a language option.

Incidentally, a quick browse of the book proves to be an interesting read — after running it through the spell checker. >;-)

More often than not, on their global Web sites they are choosing “color.”

I would call this American English largely because a man named Webster dropped the “u” a long time ago.

‘British English’ is an accepted term. Refer to Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartvik, J. ‘A Grammar of Contemporary English’. Harlow: Longman Group Limited, 1984. ISBN 0 582 52444 X.

Point two, how would you account for the people of Republic of Ireland, Isle of Man, Australia, New Zealand (and so many other countries) where English is predominantly spoken and is tightly coupled to the true and correct English language. That being the language of origin, England, also known as English English (as odd as that may look it is a correct term) or simply put “English”. These countries follow the same spelling and grammar as that used in England. Do these people use “British English”? By doing so would associate them with the “British” and I do not see that being the case. They by no means use “International English”, this too would be an insult to their nations. Therefore terminology should be used correctly to define the locale (and we are all familiar with the definition of a locale, right?) .

To conclude, my overall point is that there must never be generalisation when defining languages, “British English”, “International English”, “South American Spanish” etc. are all diffuse and hold no locale ideographies. At all times, language must be identified as a locale when not referencing the language of origin. Therefore, the language spoken in USA is English (United States) it is not English by any means, the same applies to English (Canada), English (New Zealand) and so on, and the same must be applied to all other languages, Spanish locales in particular because they have already been mutilated by misconception and ignorance. I sympathise with the people of Spain who now use a language called “Spanish (International)” — they have lost their identity completely, and Spanish is their language!

This could be debated until we are blue in the face, but the fact that a well defined language has been diluted by illiterate migrants to the North American continent still remains, and they chose to maintain a bastardised version of the English language (mostly phonetic transliteration) and this should never be spread around the world as “English” – call it “American” for all I care, just not English.

Imagine this: Bearing in mind that the English language consists of a vast amount of French words and spellings. How would the people of France feel if the people of England called their language “French”?…

That is hilarious about Adobe: “Universal English”…does that mean that they think British English is only used in space?

We have Hollywood and M$ Word to thank for this. :(

“Now what does international English actually look like? In most cases, it’s American English.”

I disagree. American English is not ‘international English’. British English is not ‘international English’. International English is English that is written for people who do not read English as their first language.

Other names for international English are ‘global English’ and ‘worldwide English’.

“All I know is that companies are trying to communicate with as much of the world as possible while spending as little as money as possible.”

I agree. Therefore, international English will become more popular.

Translation is expensive. International English gives good results with machine translation software. Therefore, in some cases, translations are not necessary. A company can have a website that is written in international English. A translation tool on the website gives readers a real-time translation of the English text.

Free translation tools give satisfactory results. Commercial translation tools let you specify how particular terms are translated. Commercial tools give excellent results.

For more information, see http://www.international-english.co.uk.

Regards,

Mike Unwalla
TechScribe
http://www.techscribe.co.uk

I really do not know the reasons for this but I could want to create an “Multiversal English” myself, see http://blog.i18n.ro/multiversal-english/