Translation, Localization, or Creation? The Stories Behind Developing Style Guides for Chinese Technical Documents

Abstract

A style guide is a document with a set of rules on voice, writing style, sentence structure, spelling, and so on that helps content creators choose their preferred textual or visual elements. While in North America, the scholarship in technical communication flourished around 2000 to discuss how to write a style guide, in China, where the technical communication field only emerged in the late 1990s, little scholarly attention has yet been paid to the Chinese-language style guides. The situation is the same in the professional world. Compared to the brand style guides from Google, IBM, and Microsoft, Chinese international brands do not have anything of equal influence. The scarcity of research on and products of Chinese-language style guide for technical documents does not only hinder the internal and external technical communication of a company, but also impacts its competitiveness in a global economy. This situation warrants our interest. To tackle this emergency of creating style guides in Chinese (as the source language), we will focus on four most influential Chinese-language style guides written by four China-based multinational corporations (Huawei, Alibaba Cloud Computing, PingCAP, and Zhongxing Telecom Equipment), trying to unravel the dynamics of producing comprehensive and house style guides in Chinese.