Dropping the you? The Asian response to imperative voice. (was: Re: you or he/it)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Sean Hower noted: <<no one has suggested that you could simply adopt a 
style that uses neither you nor the user. That would eliminate this  
entire discussion. For example: You can use the color picker to set the 
background of your pages. can be rewritten as Use the color picker to 
set the background color for pages.>>

This was suggested, and it's a good solution for a Western audience. 
But although it's good advice for "us", it's not necessarily good 
advice for an Asian audience. Japanese readers in particular (like the 
new project manager in the original message thread) reportedly find 
this imperative approach abrupt and rude, and the degree of discomfort 
may be sufficiently high to make it a bad choice for an Asian audience 
reading in English. If you've got to write one version for all 
audiences, then you need to choose a different approach.

Which leads me to a followup question: My Chinese colleagues have 
always told me that they simply accept Western style as a fact of life 
and deal with it. Yet none of them responded to my question with an 
enthusiastic "yes, and your Western style is so much more efficient and 
enjoyable than our circular/inductive/whatever Asian style of rhetoric 
that we wish everyone wrote that way in [Chinese, Japanese, etc.]". So 
perhaps they're just being polite.

Any data points from our Asian techwhirlers, or from Western 
techwhirlers who routinely work with Asian colleagues? I'd be happy to 
update the EPROMs that store my cross-cultural software. <g> Private 
replies welcome too, though I think enough others would benefit that 
public replies would be preferred.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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