Writing for Translation

A good translation starts out with a well written source document. 

Often times our translators are presented with poorly written material. 

Source documents that have serious readability issues can cause our team confusion and can easily be avoided. 

The following issues can cause delays, mis-translations and errors in your final products:

• Simple grammatical mistakes,
• Use of gerunds, qualifying nouns and pronouns
• Ambiguities and homographs
• Inappropriate terminology
• Abbreviations, Acronyms, jargon, idioms and colloquial words
• Long and complex sentence structures
• Text heavy art that will need to be completely redrawn

There are some simple rules to follow when writing for translation. 

1. Simple, clear, concise and grammatically correct sentences

2. Illustrations that show more than written text could

3. Using call outs instead of using text in art

4. Globally appropriate symbols, metaphors, icons and colors

5. Consistent format and structure with a style guide to share with the translation team

6. Create a glossary of important or industry specific terminology with illustrations when possible

7.  Use of controlled authoring, terminology and tools (like Iterotext’s Authoring Coach)

All of these writing tips will help translators produce better translations of your documents.

Resources and Additional information:

Klein, F. (1997) International Technical Communication. keyword, A journal for technical and scientific communicators. Vol 7, No 2, P17-18.

McGregor, H. (1997) International Documentation. keyword, A journal for technical and scientific communicators. Vol 7, No 2, P5-11.

Ring, P. (1997) Translation of manuals and multilingual manuals. keyword, A journal for technical and scientific communicators. Vol 7, No 2, P14-16.