Publications

Publication details [#25551]

Luchtenberg, Sigrid. 1994. A friendly voice to help you vs. working thoroughly through your manual: Pragmatic differences between American and German software manuals. Journal of Pragmatics 21 (3) : 315–319.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0378-2166

Annotation

This notice adds a pragmatic example to Krenn's (1991) findings on differences between American (reader-oriented) and German (strictly descriptive) software manuals, by examining user treatment in customer support by the same software house in those two different cultures. The differences in software instructions are related to cultural difference, but there is also the influence of the American original manual version and the translator's idea regarding the style of technical texts in both languages.