How to Ensure Clarity in Your Translations

Clarity in the materials you provide to the translator are important to both the translator and the final audience.  When you provide clearly-written, accurate content to a translator, that content stands a good chance of being understood as you intend and of being translated accurately for your intended audience.  Unfortunately, writers often know what they want to say but have trouble communicating it clearly.

To write with clarity:

• Know what you want to say.  The better you understand what needs to be said and how it should be said, the clearer the translation will be and the clearer the audience will understand your message.
• Keep your writing organized and connected to the central idea.
• Discover what the audience already knows and what they need to know.
• Use simple and direct words and phrases that the translator will understand.
• Ensure that your writing has a clearly defined purpose, message and centrally defined idea.  Each sentence should offer value and be meaningful.  Every paragraph should also serve a purpose.  Review each paragraph and make revisions to strengthen their support of the purpose.
• The organization of your writing helps in establishing clarity.  Determine if the ideas you present could be presented in a more logical order.  Also, begin with what the audience already knows and then build on it.  Develop good transitions from one idea to the next, as well as good explanations that support the information you have provided.
• The way you phrase content can either establish or destroy the clarity of your writing.  Some common elements that can confuse translators and the final audience stem from sentences being too long or overly wordy.  Strings of words lacking grammatical function, logical relationships and accurate modification, as well as mismatched groups of words, also cause confusion.  Poorly referenced pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and phrases also promote confusion.  However, chief among misunderstanding villains is use of words that actually mean something entirely different from what you intend.