Vietnamese engineering and product writing (vi-VN)

Vietnamese technical writing fails differently from Vietnamese marketing writing. Marketing copy goes wrong by being too literal. Technical copy goes wrong by being too Vietnamese — translating the English terms that Vietnamese engineers keep in English, and addressing a reader in documents that describe a system.

Both defects are invisible to a non-engineer proofreader and instantly obvious to the team that has to use the document.

Step 1 — Decide what the document is before writing a word

Two decisions follow from the document type, and both are inverted from the landing-page defaults.