Our Style Guide

A translation style guide is a manual of style which consists of a set of criteria and standards for translating, editing & proofreading documents.

This document gives specific details of how to proceed when performing one of the activities mentioned above.  It is a very handy tool for linguists working for a translation company, as the company’s criteria are established in it. Sometimes there are linguistic options that, if criteria are not unified, each linguist makes their own choice based on their best judgment, which can lead to inconsistencies within and across texts. These inconsistencies may result in a poorly translated product.

In GITS, we decided that our best approach is to have a Spanish Style Guide, so each member of our team can resort to it, in case that the client does not have their own style guide. In those cases, the client’s manual comes first. However, in every other case, our Style Guide allows us to deliver high-quality and consistent translations when working as a team. Remember that whenever we translate a document, we use the TEP process (Translation + Editing + Proofreading) performed by three different linguists. Thus, we make sure every piece of text that we translate is consistent and meets our standards.

GITS manual is comprised of three big sections:

• General recommendations when receiving, working on, and delivering a project. These recommendations are like a checklist, so linguists can ensure that each step was followed before delivering the file.
  
  
• Language-Specific Rules & Preferences: This section includes specific spelling, grammatical & syntactic rules in the Spanish language, as we are a language service provider specialized in translating from English into Spanish. Although our team is made up of all language professionals, it is always wise to remember general rules, especially when translating from English, because sometimes English expressions get in the way resulting in literal translations or calques (also called loan translation). Besides, we include some preferences for those cases where there are two or more valid options in Spanish, so in this way, all members of our team can choose the same option. Thus, we assure consistency in our translation tasks.
  
  
• Useful Resources: This is the last section in which we list some useful Spanish resources in order to adhere to the same normative references. Therefore, if linguists cannot find an answer in the Style Guide, they can draw upon these resources to clarify their doubts.

We believe that transparency is a great way to do business, so we want to let our clients know how we work to build trust.

If you are looking for a translation company to translate your products or services and go global, we are here to help you.

Contact us at www.gitstranslations.com or info@gitstranslations.com.

Focus on your company's core business, we translate your content!