Especially if you translate for direct clients, it’s important to think about style; not as in “she has a wordy writing style” (which I do…) but as in Chicago Style versus AP Style versus the many house style guides or subject-specific style guides that are out there, versus no style guide whatsoever, which is what many clients use now.
Why, you might wonder, is style so important? Well:
- Perhaps most importantly, style guides keep things consistent and thus easier to read. They keep your documents from looking like a ragged mess.
- A style guide serves as a single point of reference for everyone who writes or translates for a client.
- A style guide saves time. Instead of looking up, for the twelfth time, how the company’s address is formatted on their website (Park Ave? Parke Ave.? Park Avenue?), you just refer to the style guide.
- A style guide saves money, both in the time spent editing documents after the fact, and in the cost of fixing or even re-printing documents that have inconsistencies in them.
Working with clients that have a house style guide can be great: the rules are all laid out for you. But it can also be confusing, because house style guides generally mean that the client is not completely satisfied with any of the standard style guides out there (such as Chicago and AP)and decided to create their own. House style guides often tend to be long. If you translate regularly for the same clients, you get familiar with their house style; but if it’s a one-off job, it can be a significant time drain to familiarize yourself with a 27-page style guide to translate 500 words.
I’m a big fan of the Chicago Manual of Style, partially because I think serial commas (which Chicago style advocates, and AP style discourages) are absolutely the way to go. Otherwise you end up with sentences like “He was joined on stage by his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings” (thanks to the New Yorker’s comma queen for that one…). So, for general guidelines, like capitalization (West Africa or west Africa?), numbers (the second day or the 2nd day?), or plurals (she got all As, or she got all A’s?), I use Chicago. And while we’re at it, you can now get the 16th (most current) edition of Chicago Style in Spanish.
Whether my clients have a house style guide, or whether I’m using Chicago for my own reference, I often try to create a style guide of client-specific names and terms. Here are some entries you may want to put in client-specific style guides:
- Staff names and titles, especially the head honchos. Especially if key staff have complicated names, you need the correct version: was the CEO’s name Krzyzewski or Krzizewsky? Who’s the VP who always uses her middle initial? Does the top person like to be referred to as CEO or Chief Executive Officer, or something else? Creating standard translations for job titles and departments in your language is a great idea and can be a huge time-saver: Mergers and Acquisitions? Mergers & Acquisitions? Mergers/Acquisitions?
- The company/entity name. This sounds crazy, but organization names are often styled in a particular way, and the preferred style may change over time. And, clearly, a mistake in an organization’s name is a major source of embarrassment. In the 90s, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the American Association of Retired Persons decided to scrap their full names and just use initials. In 2004, LG suddenly decided that its initials stood for “Life’s Good.” So, make sure you have the official style of the company name.
- Product names. This is critical if you translate for clients that sell products under different names in different regions or countries. For example, Nestlé’s chocolate milk powder used to be referred to as Nestlé Quik in the US but as Nesquik in Europe. The skin cream Oil of Olay used to go by Oil of Ulay in Europe. Definitely include things like this in your client-specific style guide.
- Client preferences. Clients sometimes have preferences that may seem odd to us; but since they’re the ones who pay the bills, we need to accommodate them. For example I’ve had several clients that use the European floor numbering system (ground floor, first floor, second floor) in English. I have a couple of clients that mix US and UK spellings: for example UK spellings except for “ize” words, and so on. These kinds of things don’t necessarily stick in your head, so include them in your style guide.
Readers, over to you: any other thoughts on style guides?
To some extent, style sheets can be automated. As an editor, I use PerfectIt from Intelligent Editing. It has mainstream UK and US style sheets already loaded, but you can edit and refine them or use one as the basis to set up a new ine and save it as whatever you like. It’s an excellent program which always allows you to choose and never bullies.
There’s a lot of aids of this kind actually for professionals who work with Word.
Lucy
Good Morning Dear Corinne. Thank you for this post. Honestly, I think that Style guides are useful and necessary for translators, writters, enterprises and all those who deal with a language. It is important to know how to write correctly and how to perform a good job for our clients because otherwise they may think we are lazy and not conscious about our the importance of translation.
Congratulations for this post, wish you’ll have a happy day over there.
Regards.
I get asked about style rules “in English” so often and I always end up asking, “who are you writing for?” The client’s or publisher’s preferences might not be my own, but style guides definitely make life easier for everyone!
Hi, everyone.
I’m in love with style guides. Not with the ones that tell you kitten-heels don’t go with trousers. But the ones we linguists and language bufoons use and need. I do use most of them for editing academic work, although I am always puzzled by the minutae of differences for differnt faculty applications.
It is wonderful having a framework to work with, and it makes it easy to deduct your own rules from them.
I like your method, Corinne, of creating your own SG per client, I shall copy you on that one! I totally agree with you on keeping the AE and BE-specifics apart! It amazes me how many people still don’t get it. In their mother tongue!
The whole conversion of local lingo, sometimes referred to as lokalisation (or localization?) contains so many footfalls, that I have for my business started using the (newish) term of “transcreation” as it portrays the work included best. But that’s another subject …
I’m also a big fan of the Chicago Manual – a lot of common sense in there with a decided preference for pragmatism and adaptability over dogma! I subscribe to the online edition, so it follows me wherever I go, is never out of date, and includes user forums.
What I find difficult is walking the fine line between deference to a client’s wishes and my role as the language expert, especially when the client’s native tongue is not English. I defer absolutely when it comes to clients’ own internal lingo, but I am less pliant when clients ask me to incorporate inconsistencies, misspellings, or non-words. Good clients will listen to the sage advice of the pricey linguist they’ve hired! 🙂
On a more general point:
I’ve just completed some translations of short character-profiles for a magazine.
Unusually (these days!), the agent provided the name of the client (personal name and business name).
Which meant that I could look at the website, see who the client was (the editor), see that she also writes some of the articles herself, browse several of her articles, and therefore I could take notes about her own style of writing and the general tone of the publication, etc.
As a result I’ve made some different choices in the literary style of my deliverable translation.
Transcribed from interview, the source material was full of incomplete sentences, non-sequiturs, and dis-ordered phrases.
Looking at the client’s own writing and editing, I have a much better guide to how many ‘errors’ she would want to be ‘corrected’ as well as all the other elements of her style. After all, the character of the interviewee needs to preserved. Heavy editing would quickly remove the feeling of speech, and spontaneity.
So this is a reminder to SOME of my clients for whom job-ownership may be a sporadic task: The more honestly you confide in your translator and tell them what you want to achieve, then the better a translator is able to adapt the deliverable for you. With so many freelancers around it isn’t always easy to build up a relationship of trust, but absence of trust will lead to a poor quality deliverable. If you don’t want to share that data, go employ someone you CAN trust!