PS-REP-198 · r1 REPRESENTATION OBSERVED ENGAGED

MEASURED IN ONE LANGUAGE

The rule counts characters. The languages disagree on what a character carries.

01 DEFINITION

Condition in which a written standard for how much a surface may say is settled in one language and applied to all of them, so one allowance admits a whole statement in one language and a fragment in another, and the rule that puts the essential part first is an ordering only some of them can keep.

02 CONDITIONS

UNCERTAINTY MISSING What the allowance actually permits in each language is not stated where the writing happens.

TIME PRESSURE LOW Nothing is urgent; the cost is a sentence that cannot be finished.

ERROR ASYMMETRY ASYMMETRIC A truncated instruction and a broken layout are answered for by different people.

OPERATOR STATE CONCURRENT The reader is doing something else and gets whatever fitted.

03 WHERE IT APPEARS

RETAILProduct and status text budgeted in one language is issued to markets whose sentences carry differently.

PUBLIC SERVICEA notice written to a fixed length must say the same thing in every language the service is obliged to use.

FINANCEStatement and alert wording is constrained by a layout settled against one language.

MEDICALDevice and instruction text has a fixed allowance that different languages fill at different rates.

EDUCATIONLearning material laid out to a fixed measure is translated into languages that will not sit in it.

MOBILITYIn-vehicle text is bounded by the display and must carry the same instruction in every market.

04 WHAT AEON WORKED THROUGH HERE

Limits were written as counts of characters and the surface had to hold a great many languages. The same allowance carried a whole statement in one and half a clause in another, and a rule requiring the essential part first was one that several of them could not follow without sounding wrong. The work went into what each part of a message is for, so that the limit applied to a part rather than to a sentence.

The question it keeps returning to is what the standard is holding constant — a fixed count holds the layout still and lets the meaning vary, and a fixed meaning holds the sense still and lets the layout break.

05 LINKED TERMS

PS-CLS-031 CLASS DEFINITION DRIFT PS-COO-145 CROSS-DOMAIN VOCABULARY GAP PS-REP-178 LEGIBLE OR CREDIBLE PS-REP-195 DISTANCE SETS THE AMOUNT PS-REP-197 FORM ASSERTS KIND PS-REP-202 CARRIED BY ANOTHER SENSE PS-REP-205 GENTLE ENOUGH TO ENTER PS-REP-213 A SHORT ANSWER LOOKS WHOLE