How to Write Translation – Friendly Text

By Cristopher Fowers

The Internet has brought people from all nationalities, who speak many different languages, together in one centralized location. This globalization of information is making it necessary to overcome language barriers and effectively communicate. With the aid of translation software, a well-written document can easily convey your ideas to someone who speaks a language other than English.

Translation software translates words and sentences directly and cannot replace a human translator that can translate ideas, feelings and tones. However, if a document is well written, concise and doesn’t contain slang, it will greatly improve the machine translation.

Here are a few tips to help you write a document that will improve the results of machine-translated text.

Be direct and compose simple, clear sentences.

As you write, avoid ambiguous phrases, extra clauses, sentence fragments, run-on sentences and unnecessary words. You should shorten your sentences but don’t leave out important gramatical elements.

For example,
We went to the store and while we were there we bought some eggs and milk.
can be simplified to
We went to the store and bought eggs and milk.

Do not leave out necessary words.

In English, we can leave out relative pronouns (who, whom, that, which), prepositions, articles (the, a, an) and parts of verbs and still clearly convey our ideas. However, these words are necessary in other languages. If these words are left out of a document, the translation will not be as accurate.

Beware of Slang and Colloquialisms.

Informal words, phrases and clichés that we use in everyday conversations should be avoided when writing a document for translation. The phrase or word may not have the same meaning in another language and send the wrong message.

For example: Cool may be translated as cold or fresh in another language when the author meant to say calm, collected or terrific.

Use correct punctuation.

Appropriate punctuation provides guidance for humans and computers. Machine translation software may combine ideas that are not correctly separated by puncuation.

Check for accurate spelling.

Translation software will not translate mispelled words.

Use consistent terminology and abbreviations.

Consistency is especially important in technical writing. Use the same word, phrase or abbreviation to describe the same object or action. Inconsistent wording can cause confusion for both humans and computers.

After translating your document, it a good idea to check for accuracy. Many translation programs offer a back translate function. This will allow you to translate the text back to English so you can ensure your message is conveyed clearly. If a software doesn’t offer back translate, you can simply cut and paste the translation into the translating window and translate it back to English.

References

SYSTRAN S. (2000). SYSTRAN Version 6 Products Quick Start Guide. from
http://www.systransoft.com/index/Support/V6-Desktop-Products/Quick-Start-Guide

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