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1. Country
Country is a word that may be confusing. People wonder if country refers to the countryside in a rural area or to a nation. Please note that the word country in English does not refer to your hometown.
Incorrect: A: What country are you from?
B: My country is California.
Correct: A: What country are you from?
B: I'm from the United States.
It may surprise you, but we do occasionally receive documents at ALS with sentences referring to people's hometowns as their countries. What is most confusing, however, is whether country refers to the countryside or to a nation. If we are not sure, we change country to nation or rural area and
check with our client. At ALS, we often prefer the word nation because there is no room for confusion.
2. Formatting headings and subheadings
In Volume 17, we discussed parentheses and how the rules for using them in English were different from using them in Japanese. The same is true of formatting headings and subheadings. If you look at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/general/gl_outlinS.html, you can find a good example of an
outline with headings and subheadings. Note that the order from large to small goes from Roman numerals to capital letters to Arabic numerals to small letters to Arabic numerals with a single parenthesis. We have included another example below. This is a partial example, as an outline must have at
least two sections of every heading and subheading.
If you have A, you must have B. If you have 1, you must have 2. You cannot have 1) without 2) after the 1). There are different styles for formatting headings and subheadings, but both the Aaron and the online example look very different when compared with the way English is generally translated
from Japanese.
Example of an Outline
Approaches to Accent Reduction
I. Accent Reduction
A. Consonants
B. Vowels
C. Intonation
D. Linking words
E. Hesitators
II. Accent Reduction Exercises
A. Types of exercises
1. Drills
a. Listen and repeat
1) vowels
2) consonants
3) blends
4) words
5) phrases
6) sentences
b. Reading
1) linking sounds
2) reducing sounds
3) drama and emotion
2. Group activities
a. games and activities
b. speeches
c. dramatic role plays
This does not address clients' desire to see the English formatting mirror the Japanese original, but it does show that Japanese formatting looks awkward in English. We recommend that you remember this when you format your headings and subheadings, searching for a balance between being true to
English and keeping your client satisfied with your work.
This also does not address the issue of reformatting long documents. It may not be practical to reformat documents to the English style given issues of time and budget.
These are all issues that we must wrestle with in our daily work.
3. Feedback
In Volume 15, one of Aaron's topics was letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are one type of feedback. The purpose of feedback is to give information so that people will know what you think. When we first started writing Aaron Says, we asked a number of friends and clients for feedback on
our first issues. We wanted to make sure the topics we wrote about would be of interest. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Of course, we were very pleased to hear such positive feedback, but some negative feedback would have been helpful too.
Good feedback consists of both positive and negative information. The positive information reinforces the good things you are doing. The negative tells you what you need to think about and work on. Both are necessary.
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