Letter
from the Editor
In the early 1990's I was mailshotting Sun users
and VARs in 22 countries in Europe to try and increase sales of the SPARC
Product Directory. Following a favourable review in some French technical
magazines I decided to try and leverage my schoolboy French and translate some
sales letters into French, à la mode of Winston Churchill.
You
may guess how successful this massacre of the language was...
In my
enthusiasm, I even carried a car load of these mailshots with me on holiday,
which I reposted from Brittany. I discovered to my surprise it was actually
cheaper to mail these, using our publishers discount, from the UK. So much for
that good idea...
Eventually this experiment ended when a kind
customer phoned me and said that my order form should have been a bon de
command and not a bonne de command.
But by then I had turned my
attention to translating into that more closely related language, of American
English. The directory was launched in the US in 1993, and after several years
was eventually used and endorsed by Sun's US marketing. Then the web came along
and set us all free to publish computer information without wasting trees. | |
|
|