Cargill: Writing for English audiences

A highly sophisticated and extremely rare appreciation of the differences between English as it is used in the US and in the UK.

The Site

Cargill, a US-based provider of products and services to the food and agricultural industries globally, makes its corporate brochure available as a PDF document separately in each of 13 languages. These include two discrete English-language versions: ‘English’ and ‘English (British)’. The former is for the home, US, market.

Aside from one obvious variation in formatting – the British version has a single-page layout, the US goes with double-page spreads – the English editions share the same look and design. The differences are in the use of language, covering spelling (for example, center [US]/centre [British]); editing conventions (for example, 1 million/one million); and expressions and terminology. So, where the English version talks of “the meat made more flavorful, the bread made healthier”, the equivalent British English phrase says “the meat having more flavour, the bread more nutritious”.

The Takeaway

As Sir Winston Churchill famously noted, the US and the UK are divided by a common language. That split is, however, rarely appreciated, let alone acted on, by website owners on either side of the Atlantic.

Those who accommodate even the obvious spelling conventions in material aimed at the non-home market are in a minority. The diligence and depth of Cargill’s approach to its corporate brochure is not only highly sophisticated but also extremely rare. It has obviously employed native copy editors for each version rather than relying on spell-checkers or even ‘bilingualists’.

Why go to all that trouble when in most instances people would still get the drift of the message? Because the message would nevertheless suffer, partly through loss of subtlety, party through unfamiliarity, mainly because the simple fact of differences being noticeable draws attention to the writing and thus away from the message. That in turn makes it a less effective piece of communication. The essence of good copywriting is to let the reader concentrate on what you have to say, not how you are saying it.

First published on 01 November, 2005