Airbus Manuals - US Vs UK English

[Mike_Harrison]

Hi,

I have a question regarding the Airbus Manuals.

Being Airbus a European company, in my opinion, it makes total sense that the manuals should be written in the British version of the language.

It is quite obvious that it doesn't make much of a difference to the normal Joe if "colour" is written with or without a "u", the truth is, there aren't many differences.

But on the other hand, if there aren't many differences, and if the UK did take part of the project in the early days, why did "Jean Pierre" decide to write everything in US English?

I just can't get it...

Well, that's it..

Tks

[Mad (Flt) Scientist]

Surely it would make sense to write in the language most familiar to most of your (hoped for) customers. Which, the US market being somewhat larger, would tend to make you lean in that direction.

[Mike_Harrison]

Surely it would make sense to write in the language most familiar to most of your (hoped for) customers. Which, the US market being somewhat larger, would tend to make you lean in that direction.
So, the Airbus project started out to compete with the American domination of the Aviation Airplane market.

I'm sorry Mad Scientist... It doesn't add up...

As I said before, both versions are very similar. They are familiar to one another.

I do not know what Jean Pierre was thinking at the time!!

[megan]

His spell check was set to US?

[Wageslave]

I seem to remember the standard of "English" used in the Airbus manuals was frequently pretty poor and had clearly not been proof-read by a native English speaker.
The americanisms were irritating as this is a European aeroplane (as opposed to "airplane") and it really ought to use real English. Even the American version was of poor standard and sometimes severely garbled in translation and could often cause considerable difficulty in divining meanings - to the extent that non native english speakers would be in real trouble making sense of it, and that is inexcusable in a technical manual. It had the stamp of French or Germans translating it and assuming as they so often do that their command of English was so perfect it didn't need proofing. As ever in such situations they were wrong.

As a German once said, "You Eengleesh, you know **** nussingk! Vee Shermans, vee kow **** all!"