Global Standardization: Coping with Multilingualism

Standards are necessarily written documents. Certain linguistic aspects of the standards are related to their fitness for use. The number of complaints concerning poor language quality of international standards is in the same order of magnitude as the number of complaints about their technical content. Linguistic research pays little attention to the linguistic aspects of technical/ scientific texts. The linguistic aspects of standards are neglected both by the linguistic and the standardization research communities. This book intends to bridge the apparent gap between two distinct and distant fields: international standardization and applied linguistics. It meticulously analyses an array of topics ranging from language policy issues, via linguistic quality, management issues, translation and translatability of international standards, to the relation between the basically multilingual approach of IEC and ISO standardization and the practices of national adoption of these standards. In this way, it opens a door to a whole new field of applied research. Hans Teichmann has been Technical Officer for the Technical Committee IEC/TC 1 "Terminology" and Technical Group Manager for a number of other TCs of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) from 1981 to 2000.