Readability/Usability/Quality 3-00 (September 2000) by Amo Fuchs by Udit Chaudhuri The Original Article:RU22: Facilitate Reading

1. Comment from Amo Fuchs, Israel

I would like to comment on point 1 of Ake Rullgard's contribution in TC-FORUM 2/2000, in which he wrote:

"Stop using hyphens for breaking words at the end of a line!"

The underlying reasons for his request are clearly rooted in the English language, for two reasons:

1. English words are much shorter, on average, than in most European languages (at least those I know).
2. Writers have the freedom to break words where they wish.

"46% perform the role of user advocate/understanding the users’ perspective."

Is that one or two things?

Re point b): In most languages I know, there are (almost) clear rules for hyphenating; you keep the individual parts either with a sense (lexemes - which are partial words) or break the parts into phonetically independent parts (phonemes).

Sometimes I see English texts with words similar to other languages which are broken in a way that distorts completely any meaning, in a way that in German or Italian would be an anathema. I agree with Ake that in this case a Norwegian shore is preferable. For example, on the same TC-Forum page, a few lines later, I would never break up contributi-on (tion being a phoneme). But Kontribu-tion (well, in German I would choose another word) or in Italian, contribu-zio-ne, but then in Italian there are two phonemes in this suffix.

2. Comment from Amy S. Bryant, Germany

Hi Amo,

The problem in TC-FORUM is that an English hyphenation program seems not to be used as it contains quite a few hyphenation errors. An English hyphenation program would not produce "contributi-on", for example.

Yet the thing done in German which impairs readability to my way of thinking is the tendency to hyphenate anywhere in the word, even if it's only the first two letters. In comparison to other languages, German texts are overhyphenated, probably because of the German preference for justified text.

3. Comment from Udit Chaudhuri, India

In school (my education was all in the English language), we followed a cardinal rule not to hyphenate (to break) a word of seven letters or less. If one had to write a word of up to 7 letters and reached the end of a line, one went to the next line and left the end space blank. After starting with the word processor, in the early ones where (at least for me) it was not possible to set hyphenation on or off, I found them close to following that rule. And 'justify' setting seemed to fill the gap caused by carrying 5-7 lettered words to the next line.

All in all, where space is not a constraint, I observe (also from reader responses) that readability is better with unbroken/ unhyphenated words. However that can make it tiring to read large text or bigger words in small lines. Word distribution per line can become uneven. The trick is to select a smaller font, tighter track or higher line length as the situation permits.

Of course, in German or other European languages where you have larger words, you can perhaps do with a higher 'threshold limit' than 7 letters to break a word by hyphenation.

Reply by the Editor

Thank you for making us aware of this problem.

In this issue of TC-FORUM, we therefore follow Åke Rullgards advice "Stop using hyphens for breaking words at the end of a line!"

We realize however that Amo Fuchs’ comment ("...many fjords...) is also valid.

May we ask you, dear colleagues, to let us know your opinion: shall we produce TC-FORUM in the future without hyphenation or shall we use a hyphenation program? And, if you prefer the latter, which program would you recommend?

We appreciate receiving your opinion.

Hans Springer

Appendix by the Webmaster

Naturally, this discussion does not apply to the HTML version of TC Forum you are reading. By design this version is completely un-hyphenized. So if you wish to contribute to this discussion please check out the PDF version of TC Forum. You can access it at the bottom of the Table of Contents.

Alexander von Obert  

"transline Deutschland - Übersetzungsdienst für technische Übersetzung"