Keeping Translation Consistent Across Projects

The Associated Press has one. The Modern Language Association of America has one. And it’s a part of many large corporations. So what are we delving deeper into at Dynamic Language?

Style guides

For years, we’ve had rules written down in client-related style guides, sticky notes and burned into our brains. But for the benefit of our clients, our contractors, and let’s face it, for our own sanity, we’re working on placing all of our rules into formal language-specific style guides.

The reason for language-specific style guides is because languages and regions differ in how they address concepts such as sentence structure, grammar and punctuation. When a document is translated from one language to another, here are just a few things we need to keep in mind:

• If currency conversions need to be made
• Whether imperial or metric measurements should be used
• The format in which dates should be written
• Whether certain punctuation marks cannot be used in the target language
• And many more!

Large organizations often have style guides for consistency of written and published documents. It ensures that all documents will have the same look and feel as past and future documents.

And when it comes to the translation process, our clients trust that we’re going to treat their documents with the same level of care they would. And that’s why these style guides are so important to us.

At Dynamic, we’ve always had the belief that consistency is an important component of our high-quality translations, and we find translators who believe that as well! With these language-specific style guides, our entire team will be on the same page when it comes to how documents are translated.

But most importantly, it’s time to throw away those sticky notes!