STC Phoenix Chapter Website

Ms. Grammar

Pretereo Latin?

Although some may say that the Latin language is dead, Latin is still used in certain types of writing, particularly in the scholarly, legal, and medical fields. And American business documents are peppered with Latin abbreviations and terms that just won’t die — i.e., e.g., via, and etc. are some of the most common.

This seemingly innocuous shorthand should not be used in technical documentation, however. It is particularly bad for machine translations, as discussed in Babel Not: Machine Translation for the Technical Communicator by Sandra Bologna. She explains that these abbreviations do not always have equivalents in different languages, and machine translations do not always recognize abbreviations, in which case they are left untranslated.

What to do? Avoid these terms altogether. Common Latin terms/abbreviations include:

• e.g – exempli gratia: “for example,” “for instance,” or “such as”
• et. al. – et alii, et alia: “and others”
• etc. – et cetera: “and so on,” “and so forth”
• i.e. – id est: “that is” or “in other words”
• via — “by way of”
• viz. — videlicet: “namely”
• vs. or v. — versus: “against”

Test yourself

Rewrite each of the following sentences to eliminate the Latin term or abbreviation. The best solution may be to use something other than the definitions given above, particularly because the terms may not have been used correctly (these examples were taken from published documents). You may find the same to be true.

1. This approach leads to a system in which each functional application (e.g., Microsoft Word) is not contained in a single software component.
2. The report can include downtime by machine, shift, part, operator, etc.
3. Complete the following steps to change a running configuration (i.e., perform online edits).
4. The configuration database is accessed via the main console.
5. The main point of this exercise, viz. that there is a better way to configure the data, will be demonstrated next.
6. The PROD_INFO string provides information about the functional level of the product (Standard vs. Professional, for example).

Possible solutions

1. This approach leads to a system in which each functional application (for example, Microsoft Word) is not contained in a single software component.
2. The report can include downtime resulting from a variety of problems such as machine, shift, part, or operator failures.
3. Complete the following steps to change a running configuration (that is, perform online edits).
4. Use the main console to access the configuration database.
5. The main point of this exercise, namely that there is a better way to configure the data, will be demonstrated next.
6. The PROD_INFO string provides information about the functional level of the product (for example, whether it is Standard or Professional).

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 1:21 am and is filed under November/December 2008 Issue, Rough Draft Newsletter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.