Tips for Creating Translation-Oriented
Source Documents
A good translation begins with the source text. Even while composing a text, a writer can do a lot to minimize the preparation overhead
for the subsequent translation with a translation management system (TMS) – regardless of whether additional technologies such as
an editorial system or authoring assistance are used.
Some simple rules for creating a translation-oriented document:

Pay attention to correct

Avoid using spaces for

Use uniform date, time,

Codify the spelling of
line breaks
formatting purposes
and number formats
specialized terms
Hard line breaks (¶) should be used for new paragraphs only. The TMS interprets a
hard line break as the end of a segment. Therefore, use of hard line breaks within
a sentence results in incorrect segmentation. On the other hand, soft or manual line
breaks (Ctrl + Enter) are not interpreted as the end of a segment and thus also result
in the faulty detection of text units. Often, such line breaks are inserted unintentionally
through copying from other applications into the source document.
To indent texts, use tabs or indents; do not use multiple spaces! Such spaces are displayed after importing the document to the TMS and thus impair the appearance and
necessitate additional editing. Even if used at the same position, the spaces in the translation usually look different from those in the source document. Moreover, the translator
is often unable to judge whether a space serves a specific purpose.
For the detection of date, time, and number formats, TM system makes use of predefined rules. For example, the system settings of Across define that date formats in
German have the format dd.mm.yyyy or dd.mm.yy. However, if the numbers are separated by a space, the date will no longer be recognized as a connected group of numbers. Therefore, we recommend determining uniform conventions and consistently
applying these in your texts.
Different spelling of terms – e.g. writing a term as one word (metadata), as two
words (meta data), or as two words with a hyphen (meta-data) – is a frequent
cause of inconsistent translation, as the automatic terminology detection does not
work in such cases.
Tips for Creating Translation-Oriented
Source Documents

Spell abbreviations

Remove superfluous

Apply automatic

Use the original formats
correctly
formatting
hyphenation
If you spell an abbreviation incorrectly or in an unusual way, the segmentation during
the translation may be faulty. The sentence could inadvertently be separated into two
segments that the translator would first have to correct manually.
If you frequently use color marking to highlight text passages, be sure to remove such
from the entire text (including line breaks and spaces) prior to translation. If you fail to
do so, the "invisible" formatting will be offered to the translator as possible formatting
and could result in the translator using the wrong font type or font color.
If you want to hyphenate words, you can either use "automatic hyphenation" or manually insert an optional hyphen. Though a plain hyphen delivers a visually identical
result, it causes problems in the TMS. As hyphens are treated as additional characters in a word, the system cannot find any 100% match with existing sentences in
the translation memory. Moreover, the terminology detection cannot find any suitable
database entry either.
Whenever possible, avoid delivering PDF files as source document format for translation.
Instead, always endeavor to provide the original file formats from which the PDF files
were generated. If documents need to be revised prior to translation, formatting deficiencies resulting from the conversion can cause additional workload.
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