NRI MORT User's Manual - 2nd Edition

When NRI published the first edition of MORT User¿s Manual and Chart in 2002, the only version of the manual then available in the public domain was that written for the United States Department of Energy. Understandably, the DoE edition of the manual was written in American English and referred to documents and organisations that were relatively unknown to people outside of the intended readership. The manual was also ten years old. The first edition of the NRI MORT User¿s Manual provided European users of MORT with a question set in British English. The revisers kept to the structure of the 1992 version of the MORT Chart and stayed close to the concepts of the original (1973) MORT text. The publication of the first edition also meant that the MORT method stayed available in the public domain and accessible via the internet. This second edition arose from a project to translate the MORT user¿s manual and MORT chart into Dutch. This project was undertaken by the NRI Foundation in partnership with the Royal Dutch Navy. Early on in the project, the members of translation team realised that they were investing considerable effort to clarify ¿ in English ¿ the concepts behind some of the questions posed in the manual. In effect, the team were revising the English manual as a necessary prelude to producing a Dutch text. Furthermore, some of these clarifications suggested that changes were needed to the structure of the MORT Tree. To consider these structural changes, the Foundation formed a second team. Over a period of two years, these two teams have reviewed each other¿s ideas until consensus was reached about the changes to the MORT tree and the phrasing of the questions in the manual. In this way, a translation became a revision with a scope wide enough to justify the result as a second edition rather than as a minor revision.