Category: Editors Canada (formerly Editors’ Association of Canada)

EAC Conference 2012, Day 2—Closing keynote

Peter Milliken, Canada’s longest-serving Speaker of the House of Commons, gave the closing keynote at the EAC conference, elucidating the many roles of the Speaker and offering his perspectives on the importance of language and communication.

The Speaker’s diplomatic role gets virtually no media coverage, but it involves receptions and meetings with ambassadors, high commissioners, and other dignitaries. Milliken particularly appreciated the meetings where he got to share experiences and exchange ideas with other parliamentary speakers. The Speaker also has an administrative role—chairing the Board of Internal Economy, which approves the House’s annual budget.

Of course, the Speaker also presides over the House of Commons—the role that people are most familiar with. Milliken riffed on the conference theme of language, giving some examples of “unparliamentary” words and terms that some MPs would launch at others—”bag of wind,” “scarcely entitled to be called a gentleman,” “lacking in intelligence,” “dimwitted saboteur,” “trained seal,” and so on. Although the Speaker’s supposed to be impartial, the fact was that Milliken could hear remarks in his vicinity but couldn’t hear if an insult was uttered at the other end of the chamber. In those cases, the target of the verbal attacks would typically ask the Speaker to demand a withdrawl. Milliken objected to the fact that there wasn’t much he could do if an MP refused to withdraw a comment; the act of kicking an MP out of the House was as far as he could go, and that approach was toothless, Milliken complained, as it came with no dock of pay. In one case Milliken resorted to not recognizing an offending MP to speak until—several months on—he officially apologized and withdrew his comment.

The story Milliken told that struck me most was that there used to be three sittings of Parliament in a day—a morning sitting, followed by a two-hour lunch break, then an afternoon sitting, followed by a two-hour dinner break, and then an evening sitting. At the dinner break, all MPs would head upstairs to the restaurant in Parliament. The dining area had designated areas for each party, but there was always overflow, and MPs of all different parties would end up sitting together in the middle of the dining room, where they had an opportunity to talk and get to know one another in an informal setting. The format of Parliament was revised, however, to eliminate the evening sitting—and hence the dinner break—and it saw MPs working through lunch. They took their lunches in their separate parties’ lobbies, and there was no longer an opportunity for a collegial exchange of ideas. After that shift, Milliken found more partisanship; the House became noisier and harder to control.

In recent years we’ve seen Canadian politics become the most polarized it has been in decades. Although it would be an oversimplification to blame this change in format for our fractured politics, one can’t help but wonder about the extent of its impact.

Milliken ended by reiterating how important it is for us to look past our differences and talk to one another with respect. We never know what kinds of lessons we could learn.

EAC Conference 2012, Day 2—Plain language in 2012: what’s new?

The plain language movement is about 30 years old but is currently undergoing some exciting changes, including a push to recognize plain language as a profession. Dominique Joseph, a board member of the Plain Language Association International (PLAIN) gave an overview of some of these developments and highlighted a key role that Canadians are playing in this international movement.

The International Plain Language Working Group includes members from such organizations as PLAIN, Clarity (which advocates for clear legal language), and the Center for Plain Language. It is advocating for a standard definition of plain language, along with formal training and certification based on certain standards. Its first recommendations were published in the Clarity journal in 2011.

Among the first new steps is a move towards a broader definition of plain language—namely, clear communication. According to the working group, “A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure and design are so clear that the intended readers can easily find, understand and use what they need.” One important aspect of this new definition is the notion of “intended readers”—writers are not catering to low-literacy readers but to the target audience, and the definition is outcomes based. Also, this definition explicitly incorporates design; usability in a holistic sense—not just at the word or sentence level—is a key consideration.

The European Union has funded the development of an international clear communication program, which consists of multidisciplinary courses designed to close the current educational gap and features a mix of plain language training, information design, and usability techniques. Although the main partners are European universities, a Canadian university—Simon Fraser University—has joined the project. It hopes to launch a pilot program in the fall of 2013. This program will be based partly on a survey of the work of plain language professionals to define course learning outcomes.

Plain language expert Karen Schriver undertook a project to review over 500 research papers, from a number of disciplines, including cognitive psychology and education, on how people read and how writing, design, and technology affect readers. The review covers everything from features at the whole-text level (e.g., summaries, headings, organization and genre cures, repetition, text density, and topical structure) to sentence-level features (e.g., syntax, voice, anaphora, negatives, embedded conditionals, etc.). She’s discovered that some commonly accepted guidelines are reinforced—for example, ragged right text helps readability and a type size of between 10 and 12 points is appropriate for most print documents but type size of between 12 and 14 points should be used on screen. However, she has found some gaps in the research—more attention should be given to graphics, for example—and has come across a few accepted ideas that have been disproved, such as Miller’s Law about having a list no longer than 7±2 items, which really applies only to short-term memory and not to writing. Having a concrete summary of the results of this research (Schriver is in the process of writing a book on this topic) will offer plain language practitioners credible and authoritative guidelines.

Another exciting recent development in the field of plain language was the signing into law of the Plain Writing Act on October 13, 2010. The law requires U.S. federal agencies to communicate using plain language. The European Commission also has a clear writing campaign that spans multiple languages and aims to improve the quality of original documents so that they’re easier to translate. It is launching a pilot project to add a quality control component—i.e., editing.

As Joe Kimble shows in the new edition of his book Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please, using plain language can save government and businesses a ton of money. The book features case studies that show the many benefits of plain language.

To find out more about where there plain language movement is heading, Joseph suggests the following:

EAC Conference 2012, Day 2—The new libel defence: responsible communication

Ian Stauffer, a specialist in civil litigation, gave an overview of defamation and its defences, including a relatively new defence—responsible communication—which the Supreme Court of Canada recognized in late 2009.

Defamation was defined in the 1950 case of Willows v. Williams as follows:

A defamatory statement is one which has a tendency to injure the reputation of the person to whom it refers. It lowers him or her in the estimation of right-thinking members of society generally and causes him or her to be regarded with feelings of hatred, contempt, ridicule, fear, dislike or disesteem.

To make a case for defamation, one must prove

  • the words were published or spoken to a third party
  • the words referred to the plaintiff
  • the words were defamatory

Stauffer said that in the world of defamation, nothing is definitive. It’s hard to predict how much, if anything, a client might receive in a defamation case, and there is no scale for awarding damages. Pursuing a defamation case is also risky because the offending words are likely to be republished, and more will be said. “It’s not easy to put the genie back in the bottle,” Stauffer said.

Usually, he explained, the client will initially request an apology and retraction. Whether apologies are issues and how they are worded can affect the damages potentially awarded later on.

Defamation can be classified as slander, which is usually spoken and more ephemeral, or libel, which is typically written or otherwise recorded. Traditional defences to libel are truth (i.e., justification), privilege (absolute or qualified), and fair comment. Now there is a fourth defence: responsible communication.

Absolute privilege refers to remarks made in a chamber such as the House of Commons or Senate; qualified privilege includes performance reviews, letters of reference, etc. Fair comment refers to a comment made in good faith, without malice, on a matter of public interest. It must be identifiable as a comment rather than a statement of fact.

Responsible communication refers to reportage on matters of public interest in which the publisher has been diligent in verifying an allegation and the reliability of the source. A jury in a case in which responsible communication is used as a defence would also weigh whether the plaintiff’s side of the story was sought out and whether the inclusion of the defamatory statement was justifiable. This new defence lifts the chilling effect on reporters and frees them to write about potentially contentious matters of public interest.

Stauffer’s handed out copies of a paper he authored, “Defamation, responsible communication and cyberspace,”  which elaborates on the above issues, as well as their application to Internet-related cases, and offers examples and specific case studies.

EAC Conference 2012, Day 2—LGBTQ: getting it right

Luna Allison, a queer journalist, editor, playwright, and performer, offered her perspectives on some of the do’s and don’ts when writing about the LGBTQ communities, in the hopes, as she says, of “building knowledge and cultural competency.” Mainstream media approaches to LGBTQ issues can come off as ignorant and offensive; the key is to develop the discipline to dial back our curiosity and focus on the actual issues.

Don’t

  • use a person’s sexuality or sexual orientation in combination with their occupation (e.g., “gay MP”), unless they’ve explicitly stated that’s how they identify
  • make an assumption about a person’s gender based on how they look or sound
  • ask about a person’s surgical status
  • use a person’s pre-transition name—this is rude and exposing. And never use the term “tranny” to refer to a transsexual or transgendered person

Do

  • ask how a person identifies
  • ask what pronoun a person prefers. If you can’t ascertain this, try structuring your sentences without using pronouns (pluralizing often helps) and use gender-neutral terms
  • research to understand correct cultural usage and cultural history of particular terms (e.g., “butch,” “femme,” “queer”)
  • understand that transsexual individuals may change how they identify post-transition
  • refer to the LGBTQ communities in the plural; even within the “gay community,” for example, there are multiple communities

Allison also clarified the distinction between transsexual (someone who feels born in the wrong body and wants to transition) and transgendered (an umbrella term often used to describe someone who may be transsexual, genderfluid, genderqueer, or gender neutral). She emphasized the need to respect someone’s gender identity, which can be hard in a culture where the male–female dichotomy is so deeply engrained (for example, the first question that usually comes up when finding out someone has had a baby is, “Is it a boy or a girl?”).

In sensationalist stories in mainstream media, a lot of dormant assumptions tend to bubble up, Allison says, referencing the Luka Magnotta case in particular. His sexuality was often mentioned in close proximity to his alleged criminal activities, and journalists and editors have to be sensitive to the impression such proximity could leave on readers. She also cautioned that transgendered individuals are often characterized as being “in disguise” or otherwise trying to deceive. It’s this feeling of being fooled that has led to a lot of violence against transgendered people (and is why there is an international transgender day of remembrance).

As writers and editors, we have to be aware of the perceptions that our work might generate in our readership and the misconceptions it might feed.

EAC Conference 2012, Day 1—Whose words are these anyway? Translating, editing, and avoiding the Gallicism trap

Barb Collishaw and Traci Williams jointly presented a session about translation, with Collishaw focusing on the similarities and differences between editing, translation, and revision and Williams offering some insight into Gallicisms, particularly in Quebec English.

Collishaw works at the Parliament of Canada, helping to produce the Hansard, which, of course, must be translated so that it is complete in both official languages. Translators translate text (as opposed to interpreters, who translate speech) from a source language transcript into the target language in a way that accurately reflects the content, meaning, and style of the original. Revisers—who work exclusively in house—then edit the translated text.

Drawing upon the EAC’s Professional Editorial Standards, Collishaw compared the roles of translators and revisers to the role of an editor, noting that translators use virtually all of the stylistic editing, copy editing, and proofreading skills listed in the PES. Translation requires an eye for detail, a good command of both source and target language, and an understanding of where and how to check facts.

Collishaw emphasized the importance of keeping the audience in mind and to make room in the production schedule for translation and revision. Editors and managers sometimes forget that translation takes time, and because it comes in near the end of the process, translators often end up being under severe deadline pressure.

Translators get to choose the words they use, within the range of meaning of the source language words, so awkward or offensive terms can be smoothed over. However, this may not be what the author intended. Collishaw gave the example of “unparliamentary language”: sometimes translators soften such words or phrases, but this may not be wise, since an MP may object on a point of order later on, and revisers then have to go and restore the “mistake” to preserve logic.

Fact checking can be tricky, since translators don’t often get to query the author and ask people what they meant or how to spell someone’s name. Translators use tools such as Termium Plus, a terminology data bank, and TransSearch, a bilingual concordancer of past translations, to help them in their work, and are expected to compile glossaries. After they finish translating, translators are expected to proof their own work, checking against the source language.

Revisers check again, making sure that nothing has been left out and that meaning hasn’t been inadvertently changed, paying particular attention to details like numbers and dates. They also edit for style, imposing consistency on text from different translators. (To complicate matters, the House and Senate have different style guides, and revisers have to keep it all straight!)

I asked Collishaw if translators or revisers get to see transcripts of the interpreters as a reference, and she laughed, saying, “No, but I wish we would!” It seems that what the interpreters say isn’t transcribed, and the translators and revisers don’t have access to it.

***

Traci Williams is originally from Ontario but now works as a translator and editor in Quebec. She became fascinated by the influence of French on the English language and began to document Gallicisms—words or terms borrowed from French.

Originally, English was a rather limited language, composed primarily of one- or two-syllable words, Williams explained. The first Gallicisms appeared after the Norman Invasion in 1066, initially in law, warfare, and church language; afterwards, they began to pervade clothing- and food-related vocabulary (as seen is animals versus their meats—”pig” vs. “pork,” “cow” vs. “beef,” “deer” vs. “venison”). Between 1100 and 1500, English absorbed about 10,000 French words. Before the seventeenth century, French words appearing in English were anglicized (e.g., chimney, change, charge); afterwards, hints of the French were retained (e.g., chevron, champagne, chaperone).

In Quebec, the first major wave of English speakers were British loyalists; by 1841, English speakers of British descent were the largest population in Montreal. When rural French Quebeckers began moving to Montreal in the 1860s, they were expected to learn English, which, until 1975, was considered the language of prestige by both the French and English. During that period, a steady stream of Anglicisms seeped into French. Yet, after the PQ was voted in, in 1976, French began to influence English. At first, Gallicisms appeared in colloquial speech, but today educated professionals will use them without even realizing it. Between 1990 and 1999, the number of Gallicims tripled, and Oxford University has now officially recognized Quebec English as a distinct dialect.

Some Gallicisms are perfectly acceptable—”encore,” “fiancé,” and “en route” are examples. Cooking, dancing, and law feature many Gallicisms. And English has often retained words of both Germanic and French origin, with slightly different connotations (e.g., “ask” vs. “question,” “holy” vs. “sacred”) or has kept nouns of Germanic origin but has used the French adjectives (e.g., “finger” but “digital,” “book” but “literary”). What editors need to be aware of are the unacceptable Gallicisms that arise as a result of false cognates—words that are formally similar to words in the native language but have different meanings (e.g., “animator” rather than “instructor,” “conference” rather than “lecture,” “manifestation” rather than “demonstration”). The delicate aspect of editing Quebec English for an audience outside of Quebec is that an author—perfectly fluent in English—may be unaware that he or she is inappropriately using Gallicisms.

Williams emphasizes the importance of continuing to read, read, read. She suggests reading sources of English outside of where you live to make sure that you have a solid perspective of language quirks that might be a local peculiarity and may not translate to a wider audience. Williams has started a newsletter about Gallicisms and related topics. Contact her at via Semantech Communications to sign up.

EAC Conference 2012, Day 1—E-publishing essentials for editors

Greg Ioannou, president of EAC and publisher of Iguana Books, gave an overview of some of the things editors should know about ebooks, beginning with a bit of history: the first ebook was a computerized index of Thomas Aquinas’s works and was released in the 1940s. In the 1960s hypertext was used to format ebooks so that they could be read using different window sizes and monitors on IBM mainframes. The first ereader was Sony’s Data Discman, which displayed ebooks stored on CD.

Although there are hundreds of types of e-readers, many of them with proprietary file formats, the most common ones include EPUB, EPUB2, MOBI, and PDF. Most ebooks are basically just HTML files with metadata that help bookstores categorize them (e.g., title, author, description, ISBN, publication date, keywords, etc.) The editor [ed—or perhaps an indexer?] is in the best position to know what keywords should included in the metadata file.

At Iguana, the creation sequence is as follows:

For simple books

  • edit and style in Word
  • create PDF from Word (Iguana has discovered that they have to produce at least one print-on-demand copy for the author or, more often, as Ioannou says, the author’s mother).
  • create EPUB file using Sigil
  • create MOBI file using Calibre

For complex books

  • edit and style in Word
  • create PDF from InDesign
  • create EPUB file from InDesign
  • clean up EPUB in Sigil
  • create MOBI file using Calibre

Once you’ve created your files, Ioannou said, you should actually look at the ebook on the device(s) it’s destined for; looking at it on just the computer can be deceiving. Right now InDesign’s EPUB export doesn’t actually work very well, so the outputs have to be cleaned up quite a bit.

Ioannou then described the many devices on which ebooks could be read, including tablets, phones, computers, Kindles, and other e-readers (e.g., Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, etc.). Only the Kindles can read MOBI files, whereas the other devices can all read EPUB files. All can display PDFs, although only tablets, smartphones, and computers can display colour and play videos.

Since EPUB/MOBI files are reflowable and may be read on very narrow devices like a smart phone, editors should keep the following in mind when editing for an ebook:

  • Make sure that there are spaces before and after dashes
  • Opt for hyphenating a compound rather than using a closed compound; however, avoid hyphenations when it could lead to odd line breaks (e.g., choose “ereader” over “e-reader”).
  • Make sure all quotes are smart quotes; this is relatively easy to do in Word but much more difficult to code in Sigil or Calibre.
  • Books without chapters don’t work very well as ebooks—the large file size can significantly slow down an e-reader. If possible, break a book down into chapters of ideally between 3,000 and 5,000 words. This structure also makes navigating an ebook much easier.
  • As for formatting, keep it simple. Tables and column look terrible on an e-reader, and images won’t display in some older e-readers. Most e-readers are black and white only, and many older e-readers can’t handle large files (e.g., files with embedded images and videos).

Ioannou noted that e-readers are primitive machines and that the technology’s rapidly changing. His caveat: “Most of what I say here will not be true a year from now, and practically none of it will be true two years from now.”

EAC Conference 2012, Day 1—Making the Language Portal of Canada work for you

The Translation Bureau launched the Language Portal of Canada in 2009 as a gateway to allow everyone free access to the translation tool Termium, a terminology and linguistic data bank in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Despite its translation roots, however, the Language Portal is packed with news, tools, and references that appeal to a much wider audience of editors, writers, educators, and anyone interested in language.

The Language Portal exists in both French and English, but the sites aren’t merely translations of one another. There are different types of language problems in French and English, so although there is parallelism in the tools available to users on the two sites, the content is different.

Robin Kilroy creates and curates much of what’s on the Language Portal, and she took EAC conference attendees on a tour of the site.

Headlines

These link to language-related stories gleaned from external sources. Two headlines are posted each week and then are archived for a year.

My Portal

This is broken down for readers “At school,” “At work,” and “At home,” which link to specific resources for students and educators, professionals who have to write or edit (as Kilroy says, so many people now are “functional writers” who have to write for their jobs, though they may not consider themselves professional writers), and the general reader, respectively.

Resources include “Linguistic Recommendations and Reminders,” which offers tidbits of advice about grammar and style.

From Our Contributors

The Language Portal’s partner organizations (including the Editors’ Association of Canada) contribute language-related articles for this section, which are then edited and translated in house. They are all archived by organization name.

Discover

“Discover,” on the left-hand sidebar, and “Discover Coast to Coast,” at the bottom centre, link to the same resources but are organized differently. These are a collection of links, external to the Translation Bureau, to such resources as dictionaries and information about language training and language professions.

Well Written, Well Said

On the left-hand sidebar, this section links to Termium, Writing Tools, Gateway to English, and Quizzes (on everything from spelling and punctuation to Canadian authors and proverbs). Editors may find Writing Tools particularly useful, because it provides access to such resources as The Canadian Style (much more up to date than the print edition) and Peck’s English Pointers, among many others.

EAC Conference 2012, Day 1—Opening keynote address

Charlotte Gray, award-winning biographer and historian, kicked off the EAC conference with her thoughtful—and thought-provoking—keynote address. She praised the editor for saving her “from my own hideous mistakes.” Although she hears some writers complain that editors took out their voice, she says she recognizes that “my voice can either be a strength or a weakness.” The editor, she says, is “not only the first professional reader—but the best,” because he or she aims to help and support the editor, whereas the second professional reader—the reviewer—often approaches the text with the opposite goal.

As a writer of popular history, Gray also reflected on the malleability of history, acknowledging that words are themselves living artifacts. “In shaping history,” she wondered, “am I pulling it out of shape?” Memoirs are often assumed to be nonfiction until proven otherwise, she said, whereas John Updike’s view was that “biographies are really just novels with indexes.” She went on to describe how carefully and rigorously she seeks out primary sources for her work, walking the fine line between imagining and inventing as she uses novelistic techniques to flesh out a historical narrative.

Gray described the research and writing process for her book Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike, in which she yet again sheds light on the role of women in Canadian history, this time in Dawson—a setting she called a “pioneer Petri dish.” The book focuses on six people, including two women—a journalist and a businesswoman—and Gray colourfully recounted the “war dance” that she did at Library and Archives Canada every time she found solid evidence that her characters had actually met, allowing her to weave together their stories into a coherent narrative.

In an age where we’re constantly bombarded with information of all sorts, readers are generally less trusting, but that’s not necessarily a reflection of the veracity or integrity of sources we find today. History, Gray concluded, has always been—and likely will remain—malleable.

Mini-update

Apologies to readers who are waiting for the rest of my conference notes. I’ve just had a heap of deadlines run into one another, but I’m hoping to get caught up by the end of next week.

In other news, I had an inspiring meeting with EAC-BC programs co-chairs Micheline Brodeur and Frances Peck this week to plan out this upcoming season of meeting topics and speakers. I’m so thrilled to be working with them, and it’s looking as though we’re going to have a great year, with a little something for everyone.

In other, other news, publishers have generously sent me copies of some editing-related books to read, and I’ll be starting up book reviews for this site early this summer. In the queue so far are Editors, Scholars and the Social Text, edited by Darcy Cullen, and The Only Grammar & Style Workbook You’ll Ever Need by Susan Thurman. Stay tuned!

An amazing honour

Holy crap! I won the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence!

The award was announced at the Editors’ Association of Canada banquet on the evening of Saturday, June 2, and I was completely surprised. Thanks again to author Florian Werner, translator Doris Ecker, foreworder Temple Grandin and her wonderful assistant Cheryl Miller, proofreader Lara Smith, designer Naomi MacDougall (interior), cover designer Peter Cocking, and the whole D&M production department for making Cow happen. Thanks to Rob Sanders for trusting me with the project, and a million thanks to Nancy Flight for nominating me for the award and for encouraging me along the way.

Thanks to the EAC for having this award in the first place, and thanks to the donors, awards committee, and judges for this tremendous honour.

I had the pleasure of having a long conversation with fellow finalist Peter Midgley about our respective editing projects—both translations, interestingly enough. I’m very sorry he couldn’t have shared in the award with me, because it sounded as though we had parallel experiences. I look forward to reading the book he edited, The Man in Blue Pyjamas.