by Jennifer O Neill We work with words. Yet we handle numbers
too in our work. And what I’ve noticed from working with manuals
written by both professional and non-professional writers across
many countries, sometimes with English as second language, is
that often the cultural roots of the writer can be seen in how
they handle numbers in the document. When checking for potential
localisation issues in a manual, I first look at how the numbers
have been written before reviewing the text and graphics. This
gives me a quick feeling on whether there could be possible
internationalisation issues to look out for in the document that
may need further attention. Text has spelling and grammar but
many forget, or don’t know, that numbers also have their own
“spelling and grammar”. And this “spelling and grammar” can
differ between languages and geographic locations – number can
have a locale. I find that people often write numbers for their
own locale, which can introduce a foreign influence to the
English-source manua