Translation Style Guide

A good translation is neither a literal word swap nor a loose paraphrase — it says what the source says, in language a native reader would actually write. When those two goals conflict, meaning wins over form, but never invent, drop, or soften content to make a sentence read more smoothly.

Faithful vs. natural

• Preserve the source's meaning, tone, and level of formality exactly — do not upgrade casual text into something more polished, and do not flatten a deliberately formal register into something chattier.
• Restructure sentences freely when the source's grammar would produce awkward or unnatural phrasing in the target language. Word order, sentence length, and clause structure are not part of what you're being faithful to; meaning and register are.
• Never add information the source doesn't contain (explaining a joke, clarifying an ambiguity the author left ambiguous) and never drop information because it's awkward to render — flag the difficulty instead of silently resolving it.

Register and consistency

• Match formality consistently: if the source uses a formal form of address (e.g. "vous", "Sie", "usted"), keep it formal throughout unless the source itself shifts register partway through — in which case, mirror that shift.
• Keep terminology consistent across the whole text. If "user" is translated one way in paragraph one, don't translate it a different way in paragraph five unless the meaning has genuinely changed.
• Preserve the source's voice — a playful brand voice should stay playful, a clinical technical manual should stay clinical. Don't let your own writing style bleed into a text that has an established one.

Glossary adherence

• When a glossary or existing translated corpus exists for the domain (product names, UI strings, industry terms), follow it exactly, even when a different phrasing occurs to you as more elegant. Consistency across a body of work outranks a single sentence reading marginally better.
• Flag any glossary term that seems wrong or outdated rather than silently overriding it — the glossary is the source of truth until someone with authority over it changes it.

False friends and traps

• Watch for false friends — words that look similar across languages but mean something different (English "actual" vs. Spanish "actual" meaning "current"; English "sensible" vs. French "sensible" meaning "sensitive"). A fluent-sounding sentence built on a false friend is still wrong.
• Watch for idioms and figures of speech that don't survive literal translation — render the intended meaning or an equivalent idiom in the target language, not a word-for-word rendering that means nothing (or something unintended) to a native reader.

Formatting, units, and locale conventions

• Convert dates, number formatting (decimal/thousands separators), currency symbols and placement, and measurement units to the target locale's convention, not the source locale's — unless the brief explicitly asks for source-locale formatting (common in some technical or legal contexts).
• Keep placeholders, variables, and markup exactly as they appear in the source ({name}, %s, <b>…</b>) — never translate the placeholder itself, and never change its position relative to surrounding text unless target grammar requires reordering the whole sentence around it.

What NOT to translate

• Leave code, command-line snippets, file paths, and variable/function names untranslated inside technical content — only translate the surrounding prose and comments meant for a human reader.
• Leave proper nouns, brand names, and product names as-is unless the brand itself publishes an official localized name for that market — don't invent one.
• Leave a term untranslated (with the original in parentheses on first use, if helpful) when no established target-language equivalent exists yet, rather than coining an awkward new term that readers won't recognize.

QA checklist

• Read the translation on its own, without the source open, and confirm it reads as something a native speaker would naturally write — then re-check it against the source line by line for dropped or added meaning, register drift, and glossary consistency.