Globalvoicesonline Wiki
Register
Advertisement

Basic guidelines[]

Things to avoid:

  1. Idiom[s]
    • Break colorful idioms out into something plain, boring, and clear.
  2. Jargon and slang, terms or concepts limited to one particular language or region
    • Simplify jargon or slang, even if this means losing certain delicate connotations. They will be lost anyway in a poor translation.
  3. Complex sentences and structures, subordinate clauses.
    • When in doubt, reduce all sentences to a single clause.
  4. Long sentences
    • Break up and rewrite sentences longer than fifteen words. Avoid using more than one conjunction in a single sentence.
  5. Ambiguous terms, or any term with more than one significant definition. For instance: "mad", "funny", "print".
  6. Elision
    • While it is often possible to elide the subject, object, verb, or connecting preposition in a phrase when it is "clear" from context, what is clear to the author may be less clear to the translator.

Things to strive for:

  1. Unambiguous verbs, adjectives, and phrases. Often a more complex or longer word is the better choice, since it is easily translated. "He was mad!" is less clear than "He was insane!"; likewise "A fine thing to do" is less clear than "An honorable action".
  2. Short sentences, short paragraphs.
  3. Repetition of words, context clues, and proper nouns. Make parallelism explicit. Avoid elision and pronoun-simplification, and elision via compound sentences, as much as is remotely decent.

"Julius was angry about being deceived by Mark Antony, as he had been the last time it had happened. Julius had been deceived this way before. He was angry because he should have predicted it he would be deceived again. He Julius could not stop thinking about this as he travelled."

Controverso

Advertisement