Does your company regularly translate your English documents for the purposes of dissemination to your international offices? Then it would be extremely beneficial to design your writing with the purpose of optimizing the output of software translators.
How do you do that? Here are a few tips:
- Use articles or descriptors to clarify the part of speech a word belongs to. Articles like “a,” “that” and “the” are a great help in cluing in the translation software.
- Avoid lists and bullets. Instead, write them out as complete sentences.
- If you’re going to do lists, include articles. That means writing “a dog” instead of “dog” and “an elephant” instead of elephant when writing a list of animals.
- Avoid multi-word verbs (phrasal verbs) whenever possible. They’re usually a pain for machine translators to identify and analyze.
- Minimize ambiguity by choosing exact words, using them in the exact context of their primary dictionary meaning. If a word has multiple possible definitions, try to find an alternative that’s less confusing.
- Follow formal formatting for sentences and paragraphs, such as using two spaces after a period, one space after a comma and double space line breaks after a paragraph.
- Avoid using dashes as a punctuation mark. Their translations will almost always look horrible.