21 January 2016

Acrolinx #3

On 14 January, I sent the following email to Acrolinx:
Here is a question for Andrew Bredenkamp​ or one of his team, possibly a "tone of voice" specialist at Acrolinx Europe in Germany.

In my recent blog post on Acrolinx #1, I asked the question:

DE-to-EN colleagues inform me that even bilingual DE-EN (but DE mother tongue) executives consider the use of 'you' in EN versions of their annual reports and the like strictly taboo because the equivalent is strictly taboo in German. These colleagues also assure me that this is true even for companies that have adopted the 'one face to the customer' concept and published corporate design manuals and style guides in DE and EN. How does Acrolinx software deal with this?

​And here is a subsidiary question:
Assuming that the Acrolinx Germany team agrees that critical C-suite documents in English for German customers need to consider the use of 'you' when addressing readers, how do they convince German-mother-tongue customers that this is the way to go?

I look forward keenly to your reply.
I have yet to receive a reply. Perhaps someone from Acrolinx will post a comment here ...

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