4 Tips for Translation-Friendly Tech Writing

1) Be Boring

Remember in school when your teacher told you to “vary” your prose? Let’s forget about that (unless you’re still in school). In technical writing it’s better to be boring and consistent – sticking to a defined terminology and writing in short sentences. There even exists technical writing departments that specialize in the reduction of synonyms.

There’s no shame in keeping it simple, so long as brevity does not reduce understanding. A concise, consistent, and controlled language will generate great benefits when time comes for your text to be translated: you’re more likely to get more hits in the translation memory, and your text’s potential for reusability will grow. Additionally, if your company has plans to switch over to automated translation – always a possibility nowadays – you will benefit from using consistent language with short sentences, since such systems primarily use statistics gathered from your corpora to estimate probabilities.

2) Be Informative and Non-Ambiguous

A technical writer should be informative. The average translator is not a technical expert, and thus relies on a well-written source-text where each piece of information may be understood independently of its context. However, this will not always be the case, no matter how good the technical writer is.

In Excosoft’s CCMS, Skribenta, translators benefit from the fact that each unit of translation (a block), includes a chunk of information larger than the usual sentence, thus reducing ambiguity caused by lack of context.

There are times, however, when the unit of translation may be exactly 1 word; for example, a text string for a menu button within a user interface (many of us have had a good laugh at interface translations I would guess). And if we are especially unlucky, it’s a homonym – words that share the same spelling, and even pronunciation, but differ in meaning. Just think of the different meanings inherent in words like “bow” and “press”. In such cases, do not Google translate solitary words, unless you want to be made a laughing stock. Use your translation agency and provide them with a translation hint in your translation order.

3) Be Impersonal

Personal pronouns have no place in technical texts. Unless you’d really like to discuss cultural etiquette with your translation agency on a daily basis, be impersonal. French, Japanese, and many other languages employ honorifics, grammatical forms that encode social status.

4) Don’t Get Lost in Translation

There’s always a risk that a word goes missing at some point between a text’s original technical authoring, and its relayed translation. Technical translators often work on tight deadlines; susceptible to accepting fuzzy matches from the translation memory with a quick hit on the return key, and quickly rearranging inline elements to fit the grammatical structure of the target language. It’s easy to see how a word or two might get lost. And in the case of MIA negations, the actual meaning of a sentence might be reversed.

I once stumbled upon this translation:

“Do install the child car seat on the passenger side equipped with airbag.”

Poor kid… In this case, the negation in the Swedish source-text (“inte”) had disappeared somewhere along the way. In general, it’s preferable, even safer to apply morphological inflection instead of negating verbs or adjectives where possible: do not=avoid; not strong=weak; not enough=insufficient.