Most school districts translate into several languages. In fact, a common requirement for many districts is to provide written translations into the top 5 languages spoken in their region or translation for every 100 speakers of a language. Inevitably if you are translating into more than one language and working with numerous linguistic teams, you are bound to run into consistency issues.
Language inconsistencies may crop up in a variety of ways such as formatting preferences, fonts, literacy levels and how acronyms are translated. One way to minimize the amount of variance across languages and translation projects is to create a reference guide that captures the specifics for your school district. This reference document, or style guide, will provide clear direction to your translators on how the final education translations should be delivered while maintaining linguistic symmetry. For instance, I always make sure to include entries in my style guides that cover date preferences – should we use the US standard of month/day/year or should we use the more common European/Latin American standard of day/month/year pending on language?
By defining your district’s expectations through a style guide at the beginning of the translation process, you will be taking big strides toward preventing future headaches.
Keep Learning!
Maggie
K12Translate
Tags: Style Guides
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