Aaron Schliem
By Aaron Schliem, CEO, Glyph Language Services
What’s wrong with this sentence:
Some people prefer their coffee with cream and sugar, while others are straight, black coffee drinkers.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of a translator who is not a native speaker of English but needs to transform this into a sentence that is accurate and stylistically correct in the target language. Unfortunately, to describe coffee that has no added sugar, milk, cream, etc. as “straight, black coffee” is not a universally understood noun phrase.
If you were to provide this English sentence to a translator there is a chance you could end up with a reference to “heterosexual, African-American coffee drinkers”.
There is a better way to write source content that will save you time, money and…embarrassment.
Write it right the first time
Often companies focus tremendous energy on the technical aspects of localization while ignoring the most important ingredient in any localization initiative—the quality of the source content. After all, a translated version of your content can only ever be as good as the original source.
Very commonly content developers are disconnected from the localization process, rendering them unable to contribute to the effectiveness of the process in terms of cost, efficiency and overall quality.
That’s where content internationalization training comes in. Glyph teaches best practices for global content development so that a consciousness of the entire content lifecycle, from composition to translation, becomes engrained in the organization’s culture.
The goal of “Writing for Translation” is to create an internationalized text, one that is easily localized and translated into other languages with minimal loss of style and meaning. Your core focuses in this endeavor should be:
- Unambiguous vocabulary
- Simple sentence structure
- Neutral, culturally sensitive language
- Consistent use of terminology
A full discourse on the features of our training is beyond the scope of this article. So, in order to create a bridge between content development and localization, I’d like to offer you a few tips for writing content that will eventually be translated.
Glyph’s Top Five Tips – Writing for Translation
- Avoid culturally specific reference – Use plain English to make your point. Don’t use baseball metaphors. Why don’t you use “make an outstanding contribution” rather than “hitting a homerun.” And, please, let a “match made in heaven” simply be an “perfect combination.”
- Use 3-letter ISO currency codes – Many countries use “$” to mean their currency. The best way to keep things straight and ensure that the translation is not going to change the price of your product is to use ISO 4217 codes, like USD for United States dollars, HKD for Hong Kong dollars or EUR for the Euros.
- Don’t use hard returns….please! – Most translation vendors and individual translators use translation tools that allow them to parse your document into sentences or phrases. These segments are then matched to translation memories or used to create new translation memory. In order to allow your translation teams to make use of this standard technology in a way that limits errors and gives you the biggest discount for reusing previously translated content, it is critical that you never use hard returns to force a line break in the middle of a sentence. Similarly, if you are using a layout program like InDesign make use of the built in text flow functionality for splitting sentences and paragraphs into movable units in the layout. Do not create a new text box and move half of a sentence into it. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing happens.
- Place your modifier in the right place –
This is best explained via an example.
Wrong: “Our goal is to offer multiple fragrance options to our customers that smell great.”
Right: “Our goal is to offer our customers multiple fragrance options that smell great”
The modifier “that smell great” needs to follow its referent, “fragrances,” or you risk a translation that pays tribute to your customer’s pleasant aroma rather than the quality of your products.
- Avoid mnemonic devices – They simply won’t work in other languages (unless you have a brilliantly creative team of linguists like Glyph to create a new mnemonic device in the target language). Seriously, mnemonic devices are virtually impossible to translate effectively while retaining the power of the device. In the end you just create confusion and make your organization look like it is imposing American-style learning on people from other cultures.
By taking these tips into account as you write and edit content you will be saving your translation teams from a great deal of consternation and will perhaps save your organization from an embarrassing mishap.
If you are interested in more tips or a full training, please contact Glyph Language Services at training@glyphservices.com. We offer on-site or web-based training sessions at a very reasonable price. Ultimately, as a translation company your ability to write clearer, better content makes our work easier. Give us a call to see how content internationalization can improve your translation process.
About Aaron Schliem
“After completing degrees in International Relations and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Aaron set off for Chile, where he began his first language company with a focus on writing and editing scientific journal submissions for Chilean scientists and on developing unconventional language learning plans for motivated professionals. Upon his return to the US, all roads led to Seattle where Aaron joined two linguists and a software developer to launch Glyph Language Services in 2001. With the sweat of our collective brow, and never forgetting that language is more of an art than a science, Glyph has seen robust growth, our message resonating first with the top businesses and organizations in the US Pacific Northwest and eventually with clients worldwide. As CEO, Aaron drives Glyph’s strategic vision which oriented toward mobile application localization, games & multimedia localization and specialized terminology consulting and data development (MT-oriented dictionaries plus meta data).”
Aaron Schliem
By Aaron Schliem, CEO, Glyph Language Services
What’s wrong with this sentence:
Some people prefer their coffee with cream and sugar, while others are straight, black coffee drinkers.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of a translator who is not a native speaker of English but needs to transform this into a sentence that is accurate and stylistically correct in the target language. Unfortunately, to describe coffee that has no added sugar, milk, cream, etc. as “straight, black coffee” is not a universally understood noun phrase.
If you were to provide this English sentence to a translator there is a chance you could end up with a reference to “heterosexual, African-American coffee drinkers”.
There is a better way to write source content that will save you time, money and…embarrassment.
Write it right the first time
Often companies focus tremendous energy on the technical aspects of localization while ignoring the most important ingredient in any localization initiative—the quality of the source content. After all, a translated version of your content can only ever be as good as the original source.
Very commonly content developers are disconnected from the localization process, rendering them unable to contribute to the effectiveness of the process in terms of cost, efficiency and overall quality.
That’s where content internationalization training comes in. Glyph teaches best practices for global content development so that a consciousness of the entire content lifecycle, from composition to translation, becomes engrained in the organization’s culture.
The goal of “Writing for Translation” is to create an internationalized text, one that is easily localized and translated into other languages with minimal loss of style and meaning. Your core focuses in this endeavor should be:
- Unambiguous vocabulary
- Simple sentence structure
- Neutral, culturally sensitive language
- Consistent use of terminology
A full discourse on the features of our training is beyond the scope of this article. So, in order to create a bridge between content development and localization, I’d like to offer you a few tips for writing content that will eventually be translated.
Glyph’s Top Five Tips – Writing for Translation
- Avoid culturally specific reference – Use plain English to make your point. Don’t use baseball metaphors. Why don’t you use “make an outstanding contribution” rather than “hitting a homerun.” And, please, let a “match made in heaven” simply be an “perfect combination.”
- Use 3-letter ISO currency codes – Many countries use “$” to mean their currency. The best way to keep things straight and ensure that the translation is not going to change the price of your product is to use ISO 4217 codes, like USD for United States dollars, HKD for Hong Kong dollars or EUR for the Euros.
- Don’t use hard returns….please! – Most translation vendors and individual translators use translation tools that allow them to parse your document into sentences or phrases. These segments are then matched to translation memories or used to create new translation memory. In order to allow your translation teams to make use of this standard technology in a way that limits errors and gives you the biggest discount for reusing previously translated content, it is critical that you never use hard returns to force a line break in the middle of a sentence. Similarly, if you are using a layout program like InDesign make use of the built in text flow functionality for splitting sentences and paragraphs into movable units in the layout. Do not create a new text box and move half of a sentence into it. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing happens.
- Place your modifier in the right place –
This is best explained via an example.
Wrong: “Our goal is to offer multiple fragrance options to our customers that smell great.”
Right: “Our goal is to offer our customers multiple fragrance options that smell great”
The modifier “that smell great” needs to follow its referent, “fragrances,” or you risk a translation that pays tribute to your customer’s pleasant aroma rather than the quality of your products.
- Avoid mnemonic devices – They simply won’t work in other languages (unless you have a brilliantly creative team of linguists like Glyph to create a new mnemonic device in the target language). Seriously, mnemonic devices are virtually impossible to translate effectively while retaining the power of the device. In the end you just create confusion and make your organization look like it is imposing American-style learning on people from other cultures.
By taking these tips into account as you write and edit content you will be saving your translation teams from a great deal of consternation and will perhaps save your organization from an embarrassing mishap.
If you are interested in more tips or a full training, please contact Glyph Language Services at training@glyphservices.com. We offer on-site or web-based training sessions at a very reasonable price. Ultimately, as a translation company your ability to write clearer, better content makes our work easier. Give us a call to see how content internationalization can improve your translation process.
About Aaron Schliem
“After completing degrees in International Relations and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin, Aaron set off for Chile, where he began his first language company with a focus on writing and editing scientific journal submissions for Chilean scientists and on developing unconventional language learning plans for motivated professionals. Upon his return to the US, all roads led to Seattle where Aaron joined two linguists and a software developer to launch Glyph Language Services in 2001. With the sweat of our collective brow, and never forgetting that language is more of an art than a science, Glyph has seen robust growth, our message resonating first with the top businesses and organizations in the US Pacific Northwest and eventually with clients worldwide. As CEO, Aaron drives Glyph’s strategic vision which oriented toward mobile application localization, games & multimedia localization and specialized terminology consulting and data development (MT-oriented dictionaries plus meta data).”
