{"id":1664,"date":"2015-06-29T13:32:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T13:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/wp\/2015\/06\/29\/want-cheaper-better-faster-translations-tighten-your-text\/"},"modified":"2017-03-13T18:37:12","modified_gmt":"2017-03-13T18:37:12","slug":"want-cheaper-better-faster-translations-tighten-your-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ata-divisions.org\/S_TD\/2015\/06\/29\/want-cheaper-better-faster-translations-tighten-your-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Want Cheaper, Better, Faster Translations? Tighten Your Text!"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Marcia Riefer Johnson, Science and Technology Division Distinguished Speaker at the 2015 American Translators Association Annual Conference<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/i>A version of this article originally appeared on the Confab 2015 site<\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/o:p><\/span>

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Why I Talk about Tight Writing<\/h2>\n

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We all use too many words. In and of itself, cutting unhelpful words (or sentences, or paragraphs, or whole chapters or blog posts) doesn\u2019t make writing good. But it always makes writing better.<\/span><\/div>\n

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One reason to care about conciseness is money. Extra words carry dollar signs\u2014especially if your company publishes in multiple languages. If you tighten before you translate, you can save staggering amounts of money.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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As Val Swisher, author of Global Content Strategy: A Primer,<\/i> says, when you tighten your sentences, you achieve \u201cthe ultimate trifecta: cheaper, better, faster translations.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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The \u201ccheaper\u201d part of that trifecta comes down to simple math. This spreadsheet example shows how I tightened a sentence from the book Death in the Afternoon<\/i>, written by Mr. Minimalism himself, Ernest Hemingway. His sentence has 17 words: \u201cWrite when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.\u201d Remove four words, and you increase the sentence\u2019s impact without losing any meaning or sacrificing sonorousness. More impressively, at least from a business point of view, this kind of edit reduces translation cost. At 25 cents per word per language (a common translation rate), cutting these four words reduces the cost of translating this sentence into 25 languages by $25.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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Not impressed? Scale up to 10,000 sentences. (That\u2019s how many you\u2019ll find in a typical Harry Potter novel. Many websites contain far more.) Reduce each sentence\u2019s word count by this same percentage, and you save $250,000.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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If your company delivers lots of translated content and tightens its text by even ten percent, it can save millions\u2014or tens of millions or hundreds of millions\u2014every year.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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Whether you\u2019re a writer or a strategist who works with writers, imagine the raise you\u2019ll justify when you routinely save your employer or clients this kind of money.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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Download:<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
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