Typesetting Language Translations Can Lead To A Change In Meaning

Changing written text from one language to the next can be a complex and tricky process

. Creating the ideal translation may be marred by technology and well-meaning people after the product is essentially complete. Typesetters, printers, proofreaders and spell checkers deliberately or inadvertently change spelling, punctuation and meaning in a variety of ways. This sometimes changes the translation from being accurate to inaccurate. This can cause embarrassment, frustration and translation failure when the errors are not fixed before the final product is delivered. Checking over text after it has been typeset will reduce and hopefully prevent the following errors:

Punctuation

Many languages use different punctuation marks. Punctuation affects pronunciation, meaning and/or spelling. These marks can be changed on purpose or by mistake during the typesetting process.

Hyphenation rules may be automatically imposed upon text by desktop publishing software programs. The program's automated page layout features may add a hyphen in the wrong place which is as bad as a misspelling.

Changing accents, umlauts and other diacritical marks may drastically alter a word's meaning and pronunciation. During the desktop publishing they may be misplaced, removed or turned into other characters or marks.

Languages and Fonts

Using the correct font is vital in typesetting the translation of written documents. Some fonts do not carry all of the characters required for use by a certain language. For example, some of them eliminate the apostrophe even when the key is struck. Use of certain fonts may result in a blank space in its absence, while others close the space where the apostrophe should be. This can cause changes in meaning or the creation of new words in the middle of a sentence.

Other font-specific irregularities may affect quotation marks, question marks and accents. Not only does the punctuation become incorrect, but grammar and/or meaning may be altered as well. Using automated translation programs may have this effect as well, since characters from some languages simply do not exist in some font styles.

Format

When printing documents, the amount of space used for a specific article in one language will be different from the amount of space used in the translated version. For example, this may happen with an English to French text translation. Certain languages contract and others expand. Sometimes more than one word must be used to convey the same meaning. Especially with captioning, the amount of space reserved by the document designer may be too small. Nudging text out of a text box is a common problem and is sometimes hard to spot. A different font size has to be used or the amount of space must be increased. Careful proofreading will often catch this error before it becomes finalized. When the allotted spaces too much, the designer must adjust the text to fill up the space.

by: Christine Harrell

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