Is it just me or does anyone else find the owners manual less than crystal clear?

25 years ago I used to work in Germany as a technical illustrator for tech doc company producing technical artwork for BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Dornier, MAN. It was for engineers, internal teams, R&D, concepts and so on. Not for consumers. I worked on a concept hydrogen / electric BMW 5 series early 90s amongst other things.

We used to work with technical authors who would write the text to go with our illustrations. Back then, and I can only assume it's still correct today, there was a very very limited vocabulary they were allowed to use to match international standards. put, pull, position, turn etc. The only unlimited words allowed outside the small group were technical nouns - washer, bush, bearing, catalytic converter etc specific to objects being described. The key reason was that it creates a common mechanical engineering 'language' understood by engineers and technical roles across the world. It can be very easily and quickly translated.

The problem was it created a certain stilted English that isn't fluent or immediately understandable until you 'tune in' to the style.

This shouldn't affect consumer facing documentation, such as manuals, but inevitably the style spills over as the manuals are written by the same people. The companies also want to take advantage of the quicker, and cheaper, translation that comes with this style of writing too.

The downside is the manuals never read in a fluent and natural way. If it's any consolation, the manuals in other languages are equally clunky.

I'll be honest and say I've never really had that many problems with it generally. There do seem to be the odd mistakes here and there, but that might be down to translation from the native language the manual was written in. 

The Czech language is very complex and precise. English doesn't have some of their words or expressions. So the translation was probably difficult, hence some of it might not appear to make sense at first glance.

I think it always has been the case that owners' manuals written in a language other than the manufacturers' own is going to be less than completely clear. I remember my parents having a 1976 Toyota Corolla and the 'Japlish' in the manual for that was hilarious in places!

 

Essentially because a native English speaker that also speaks a language such as Czech is about as common as rocking horse poo, manuals are going to be written by authors who have English as a second language. So whilst the manual should be possible to understand, it won't be expressed in the same way as a native speaker would put it, and therefore may seem unclear.

Edited 14 April, 201610 yr by grebble

Wonder if VW have a library of instructions for the various shared components in their cars i.e. aircon, radios etc

 

This could be in German, so may the Superb manual may have been translated German>Czech>English?

Feel for people who speak really rare languages. For example I imagine the number of people who speak say Icelandic and Czech are very small - so manuals will be written in those languages through English or perhaps German.

They read just as poor in their own languages.

I have found a cracking error (although not dangerous) in the bit explaining how to open the cover of the 'phonebox' it refers to the part as the fuel filler cover

I have found a cracking error (although not dangerous) in the bit explaining how to open the cover of the 'phonebox' it refers to the part as the fuel filler cover

I found this issue back in July last year, when i was reading it o line, long before i got the car, I emailed Skoda Customer Services and pointed it, they emailed me back and said that they would pass the information on, not heard anything more since then.

I have found a cracking error (although not dangerous) in the bit explaining how to open the cover of the 'phonebox' it refers to the part as the fuel filler cover

 

The explanation on how to open the little drawer under the passenger seat advises you to pull lever A and withdraw the 'windscreen wiper' in the direction of arrow B. Clearly there was some copying and pasting going on and someone forgot to change things a few times.