From Bill Courtney
The use of deconstruction philosophy may be helpful in drawing up guidelines on how safety texts should be written, but it would be a cumbersome tool for analysing long technical documents (7 September, p 12).
Part of my own engineering work is concerned with writing patent applications in my native tongue, English. If I need to extend patent protection to France, I have to use a professional translator who speaks good technical English but whose native tongue is French. No matter how carefully I craft the wording of my patents, the translator still finds some ambiguity.
This suggests a simple way of identifying ambiguities in safety documents: work with a technical translator, who would translate the document into another language. A second translator could add a higher level of refinement by translating the new document back into the original language.
Altrincham, Cheshire
