• A company’s image
• A company’s reputation
• The perception of a given product or service’s quality
• The likelihood that a prospect will respond to a call to action

It’s one of my pet peeves. I’ve hammered the message here, here, and here, and again here and there.

Now, thanks to Sue Anderson-Lenz over at Marketing Lure, we’ve got numbers to back that up.

Sue ran a survey with 163 participants – business professionals largely from the US, “although the survey reached people in 16 different countries.” Note: it is not clear how many respondents were indeed from outside the US.

“One hundred percent of the people surveyed acknowledge that writing errors indeed influence their opinions. Nearly eight out of ten people have eliminated a prospective company — in part because of writing errors.“

And,

“Write‐in responses to one question reveal the impact that writing errors have on company credibility. Respondents said that errors will cause them to question the company and their leaders who permit writing errors to happen.”

Further,

“More than half of all respondents agreed that one error in any print material could be the kiss of death for a prospective company.
Four out of ten people expressed an extremely low tolerance for errors in electronic articles and books.”

Download a copy of Sue’s report from her blog: it’s a must-read -

For clients, as a needed reminder of the extent to which business success depends on good writing (no, it’s not an expense, it’s an investment).

And for professionals of the written word, as actionable data to support your positioning, dialog, and negotiations with prospects.

Lorsque celui-ci ne pratique pas la langue dans laquelle il vous demande un rendu écrit, cela peut être source d’inquiétude puisqu’il doit pouvoir justifier son choix de prestataire.

Quand le projet est une traduction, le client peut au moins s’appuyer sur le document en langue source pour essayer d’apprécier votre travail. Typiquement, en cas de doute, il fera appel à une connaissance capable de lire votre texte pour se rassurer. Et parfois, cela laisse la porte ouverte à des situations plutôt cocasses où la réponse pédagogique du prestataire fait toute la différence.

La perception de l'autre est imprévisible

Quelles précautions prendre, en revanche, lorsque votre client monolingue fait appel à vous pour un projet rédactionnel (copywriting) dans une langue qui lui est étrangère ?

Comment gagner sa confiance ? Comment le rassurer ? Comment vous protéger vous-même en cas de lecture de contrôle par des tiers qui n’étaient pas présents lors de la prise du brief client détaillé ?

Après tout, le texte que vous avez conçu et rédigé de toutes pièces peut plaire à Dupont, mais pas à Durand, tout est affaire de style, de goût : cela ne se discute pas, mais cela peut se gérer.

Anticipez !

• Faites un résumé écrit de votre compréhension du brief client et demandez à votre donneur d’ordre de l’approuver avant de commencer à travailler.
  -Type de texte
  -Son but (que doit faire / ressentir / savoir l’auditoire après sa lecture)
  -Contexte (où va-t-il apparaître ? Doit-il être en harmonie avec les autres écrits ou au contraire sortir du lot d’une manière ou d’une autre ?)
  -Longueur
  -Niveau de langage
  -Ton
  -Informations client fournies qui doivent être incluses
• Votre proposition prévoit un certain nombre d’allers-retours avec le client. Précisez qu’une des étapes de révision implique l’éventuel collègue de votre client pour
  -Rassurer le client en amont
  -Mettre ce tiers inconnu dans la boucle avant que le projet ne soit bouclé (sic)
  -Une partie prenante impliquée dans le processus du projet est plus à même de le soutenir
  -Eviter de perdre du temps avec des révisions supplémentaires en aval non-incluse dans votre tarif
• Lorsque vous rédigez votre premier et deuxième jet, prenez quelques minutes pour:
  -Cocher les points du cahier des charges auxquels vous avez répondu
  -Expliquer certains choix de mots (exemple, dans un projet récent, j’ai utilisé “first rate” et ai négligé d’anticiper l’interprétation possible du client qui, j’aurais dû y penser, l’a ressenti comme ‘bas de gamme, premier prix’ au supermarché !)
  -Pointer les éventuelles différences culturelles qui vous amènent à écrire avec plus ou moins de détails factuels, en activant divers leviers de valeurs ou en évoquant des références populaires qui pourraient être inconnues de votre client

Et vous, chers clients ? Que peuvent faire vos prestataires pour devancer vos questions, conforter votre choix et bâtir avec vous une relation de travail confiante et épanouissante ?

Wrong.

Take law firms. OK, maybe they are easy to pick on.  I put myself through university working as a paralegal; it’s a context I know fairly well.

At some point, most individuals and businesses need to seek counsel. With your physician, an attorney is the professional with whom you will have the closest – and possibly most dependent! – relationship. Trust, confidentiality, responsibility, reliability – maybe even caring – are as essential as subject-matter expertise.

Referrals and notoriety remain the top ways to gain new clients. Yet, in recent years, law firms have realized it is not enough to ensure durable growth in a highly competitive (not to say cut-throat) climate. They have invested in their Web presence, and some even have business development and/or marketing departments.

Lead generation is the primary reason for investing in a Web site. Web content aims to inform, educate, entertain. Web copy seeks to influence and persuade the reader. Professional services firms’ websites need an appropriate balance of both.

A Web site’s landing page is key to visitor retention. In other words, to get the prospect to click and discover the content of your website.

Are major legal practices’ Web sites speaking with their potential clients or at them?

To answer the question, I picked the top 10 American firms by revenue from the most recent survey available on the Internet (2007 figures) out of a listing on the world’s 100 largest law firms and captured their landing pages. You can see them all here if you like.

Call it a coincidence, if you must, but the No.1 American firm on the list is also the ONLY one to use you or your on its landing page.

The Flash object in the middle of the page presents Baker & McKenzie’s four core values by speaking with the client or prospect. (The only criticism is that this is in Flash, which is not optimal for Web referencing).

The first item in the navigation menu on the top right corner of the page is “Supporting Your Business”. The rest of the global Web site does not disappoint. They’ve made it a point to frame interesting and catchy copy into a conversation with the visitor.*

None of the other sites on the top 10 list speak with the visitor, even if most of them are generally well-designed.

Compare this, if you will, with the landing page of a well-known, prestigious, New York City law firm, which is not on the top 100 list. Correction: it is not even the landing page. The visitor first has to choose whether he wants general information or career information. The entire site is in Flash, leading to clear SEO and accessibility issues.

The copy is mind-numbing.

Passive voice, overwriting and not a single reach out to the reader.  Compelling copy?

What do you think?

*I have neither worked for nor hired Baker & McKenzie and have no relationship of any sort with the firm.

Son auteur avait passé des semaines à le peaufiner, agonisant sur le choix de mots clés et sondant divers relecteurs externes sur l’équilibre du texte et l’impression qu’il laissait à ses lecteurs.

Puis, le texte est a été confié à un traducteur pour que celui-ci fasse un miracle : lui concevoir son jumeau en anglais (ou toute autre langue, peu importe pour ce conte).

Le traducteur passa des jours et des nuits — mais sans avoir autant de loisir que l’auteur d’origine, bien sûr — pour pondre de toutes pièces un nouveau texte capable d’accomplir avec brio, pour un autre auditoire, ce que la prose française se targuait de faire pour son lectorat local.

Le traducteur, aussi, agonisa sur le choix des mots pour trouver exactement le même registre et le même effet dans cette autre langue. Il restructura certains passages pour respecter les codes américains et substitua, le cas échéant, des exemples de culture populaire qui résonneraient avec cette autre cible. En collaboration avec son relecteur, il s’assura que tout était parfait, jusqu’à la dernière virgule, avant de le rendre à son client.

PAO  impression, et économies de bouts de chandelle

Le client a une équipe et des prestataires compétents,  serviables et bourrés d’initiative. Il a aussi un planning serré. Il choisit alors de passer outre la recommandation de son traducteur professionnel de lui laisser relire les épreuves avant que le document parte en impression.

Pensant bien faire, l’équipe de production corrigea les guillemets, les tirets, remis les espaces “oubliés”, coupa des mots en fin de ligne, corrigea des “fautes” d’orthographe, puis lança l’impression.

Le client se retrouva confronté à un choix pénible

• Faire recorriger les épreuves et relancer l’impression (le coût, élevé, est connu).
• Laisser diffuser un texte — qu’il souhaitait parfait — en son état médiocre (les risques de perte de crédibilité et de réputation sont importants, difficilement mesurables et souvent durables).

Clients, que feriez-vous ?

Clients, si vous souhaitez recevoir notre fiche mémo
sur les erreurs les plus courantes à éviter lors de l’impression
de documents en anglais américain, envoyez-nous un mél à
info[at]francoamericanquill[point]com

As you master increasingly difficult positions, proper breathing becomes automatic: you are no longer consciously engaged in leading your body’s inspiration-expiration dance.

Writing workshop

Ros Schwartz and Chris Durban’s writing workshop for translators, Style Matters I, held in Paris February 5^th, was an immersion in writing translations for publication.

It offered valuable advice and techniques for those wishing to hone their craft and invited a return to consciousness for those used to leveraging their writing skills to serve their clients’ interests.

Writers and translators rely on proficiency of language to craft high impact texts. They also use their senses and their instinct, just as painters and musicians do to give life to colors and notes. With experience, techniques learned and practiced merge with creative intuition, words flowing together in an artful dance as if graced with a life of their own.

Conscious choreography

Working in a group spurs conscious engagement.

Why did we choose a word rather than another? What awkwardness in this turn of phrase tickled your pen to change it? What effect do you think this change has on the balance of the text or on the message it is to carry? What solutions did colleagues find to transform gibberish into music?

Chris asked me whether I’d found the course useful.

The answer is a resounding yes, for several reasons. It spurred a return to the consciousness of doing, and the satisfaction and enrichment this brings. Watching how colleagues approach a text and hearing the solutions proposed can boost your own creativity. And developing relationships with others who work in similar areas broadens opportunities, as a team, to take on complex projects for demanding clients.

And I learned that, in UK English, an m-dash is an n-dash and it takes a space before and after it.

So, when is Style II coming to town?

Pour rappel, 80 % des effets est le produit de 20 % des causes. A force de vouloir toucher toutes vos cibles et répondre à toutes les attentes possibles, vous perdez les visiteurs que vous avez dépensé des sommes conséquentes à essayer de séduire.

Jakob Nielsen, le guru des tests d’utilisation de sites Internet, précise qu’en moyenne les visiteurs n’ont le temps de lire qu’environ 20 % des mots affichés sur la page.

Se basant sur une étude menée par Harald Weinreich, Nielsen a établi une typologie de lecture de pages contenant entre 30 et 1 250 mots. Le graphique ci-dessous représente le nombre de mots maximal qu’un visiteur pourrait lire au cours d’une visite type.

C’est édifiant. Pour que vos visiteurs lisent la moitié des messages que vous souhaitez leur faire passer, votre page ne doit pas dépasser 111 mots !

Si trop de contenu tue le contenu, vous comprenez la nécessité de :

• Choisir votre cible et le ton qui lui convient
  
  La Toile est une conversation, pas un cours magistral. En essayant de parler à tout le monde, vous ne parlez à personne.
  • Adressez-vous à votre cible : “je”, “nous”, “vous” engagent ; la troisième personne refroidit.
  • Utilisez un langage neutre, objectif, bien plus crédible que l’hyperbole ronflante.

• Rédiger des messages percutants

  Chaque mot compte. La mise en forme est primordiale. Les Internautes ne lisent pas une page, ils scannent des blocs de textes.

  • Prenez un texte existant. Réduisez-le de moitié. Essayez de le réduire encore d’un tiers.
  • Utilisez des sous-titres qui ont un sens.
  • Employez une mise en forme qui facilite la lecture scannée (mots en caractères gras, liste à puce).

Ecrivez pour le Web comme vous parlez d’amour :
” je vous aime beaucoup. “

Moins, c’est plus.

Total : 308 mots. Taux de lecture estimée : env. 35 %. Qu’avez-vous retenu ? EY98DQ6HK5SX

As I work my way through 30 Days to Better Business Writing, Matthew Stibbe’s recently published e-book for wordsmiths, several chapters swirl in my head, calling for a client-oriented version.

Maybe even client-oriented versions in other languages. Take Day 7, “Analyse bad writing”, and Day 16, “Manage your writing”, for example.

Selling copywriting services to companies that recognize the benefits of good copy is a relative cakewalk. Selling to those that are the most in need of good writers is often an uphill battle. The are many reasons for mind-deadening copy, but two stand out:

• A lack of awareness of how ineffective the company’s written communications really are (and how they got that way)
• A not infrequent epidermic reaction by the text’s author to suggestions for improvement (often senior in-house staff)

The challenge is compounded when striving to produce compelling copy in another language from insipid source text. If Churchill had lived in the Internet age and perused multilingual corporate websites, I doubt he could have claimed “eating words has never given me indigestion.”

Tweaking some of 30 Days’ chapters to resonate with business writing buyers might just offer the gentle push some companies need to look at their copy more objectively. It would be the perfect companion to Chris Durban’s often cited guide to buying translations, Translation: Getting it Right.

A good team is more important to a successful business than products or profits, according to Lee Iacocca. Including good writers on your corporate team is an essential investment. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere,” he quipped.

In any language.

So what can writing and a wardrobe have in common?
Clutter.
Excess.
Useless elements.
Weightiness.
Disorganization.
Lack of style.
Incoherence.
Sloppiness.
Stains.
Redundancy.
And by the way, no this is not my closet .

You can apply techniques used to polish copy to sort out your wardrobe.

• Why use three words when one will do? (Just *how many* black pants do you own?)
• How can you avoid using the passive voice? (You bought that sweater in Amsterdam in 1981, it’s had a good life.)
  
• Are some sentences too long? Can they be cut? (You keep up this shoe fetish, we’ll start calling you Imelda.)
• Do your ideas flow in a coherent order? (No wonder it takes forever to find something, the spaghetti strap dresses are next to the ski pants.)
• Are you using punctuation wisely, enhancing readability? (Give it up: you’ve tried for 5 years, the stain on your favorite silk blouse is never going to come out.)
• Is there any jargon left you should dispense with? (Miniskirts are not coming back, or, when they do, you shouldn’t be caught dead in one. Pitch.)

Getting the idea?

P.S. Remember: you may no longer need or want these clothes, but they can help others. There are Freecycle groups all over the world and local non-profit groups you can contact.

No, I am not referring to precise terminology used by a specific group of people and only occasionally understood by those outside the group. If, for example, you are writing or translating a medical text for an audience of specialists, you should be writing perorbital hæmatoma and not the plain English ‘black eye’ or the French layman’s ‘œil au beurre noir’.

I am talking about my pet peeve (or one of them, rather), the use of jargon that has become as prevalent as driver incivility.

The French have a more imaginative way of calling it: langue de bois or wooden tongue, that is to say the ability to expound at length, striving to sound intellectual/intelligent/in the know (pick one) without having to provide any real content. Listen to public officials’ speeches or the talking heads on news programs and you’ll see what I mean.

Often, the author of a text is unaware of its jargon density ratio.

As a translator, what do you do when your jargon-meter goes into the red zone? Do you remain faithful to the source text or do you strive to improve it? Savvy clients will want copy best suited to their target audience and objectives. Open-minded clients might even revise their source text for clarity or ask you to do so.

Jargonspeak can be contagious. Like a behavioral tick, you may not always be 100% aware jargon has slipped into your own writing. And when on a tight deadline, chances are you’ll focus your final review on spelling, grammar, and typography rather than on clarity of style (you’ve already spent a lot of time on that, right?)

Here are some free tools that can help you get rid of the last bit of drivel in your copy.

• Bullfighter, software originally developed by Deloitte that works as a plug-in in MS Word and PowerPoint. Its “Bull Composite Index” calculates your text’s jargon density (hint: you want as low a score as possible). BullFighter works best with Office 2003 and XP. I have two computers with Office 2000 and XP Pro: BullFighter works on one, but not the other. Why remains a mystery…
• DrivelDefense, a Java-based application that helps you check if your text is written in plain English. It analyzes your sentences and suggests other words if it suspects you’ve let jargon slip in. Because this application is Web-based, there are no compatibility issues. The Plain English Campaign’s Web site is full of freebies, including Plain English magazine, style guides, and specialized glossaries. They also run the Golden Bull Awards in honor of the year’s best examples of gobbledygook. Click here for the 2008 Golden Bull winners.
• You can check your terminology against the MBA Jargon Index and contribute your own definitions. Better yet, take a break and read through the Index: laughter oxygenates the brain.
• If you run business English writing workshops, you might like to try the Buzzword Bingo game.

Of course, none of these solve the question “How or if to translate jargon” and I plan to chat with my client tomorrow about his French jargon-infested piece. Maybe I should have written a post called What happens when a management consultant writes marketing copy for a non-profit? But these tools may help me catch whatever drivel words managed to disguise themselves as acceptable vocabulary.

Do you find yourself staring at a blank word processing screen or procrastinating turning on your computer?

Are you motivated by reward (”quick wins”) or by sanction? Or a combination of both?

Then this little web app is for you. I stumbled onto Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab this morning and am using Write or Die to compose this post. I gave myself 15 minutes and set it to Kamikaze Mode.

I am motivated by both carrots and sticks. Write or Die helps me focus my thoughts so I can keep typing away and rewards me when I have met my word count and time goals.

But should my mind wander off somewhere (“Is there any coffee left?” “Does the dog need to go for a walk?” “Egatz, I’ll never make this deadline…”), it punishes my waning discipline. The sanction in Kamikaze Mode is stiff: your prose is erased, one painful word at a time (there are tamer settings for those times a gentle reminder is enough).

Check out Dr.Wicked’s website and see how his web apps and advice can help you get writing.