Part of the Translyta reference: the linguistic foundation of our translation pipeline. New here? Start at the overview.
Category
Codification
25 entries
Notation and units
How a community writes numbers, dates, money and measures, and the conversion a translation owes where two communities disagree about the same string.
Currency and amount notation
Where a currency code or symbol stands beside an amount, and on whose rule.
Date and time notation
How a date and a time are written, and which authority the notation answers to.
Decimal and digit grouping
How the decimal mark and the digit groups are written, and which authority governs.
Figures versus words
When a number stands in figures and when it is spelled out, and on whose threshold.
Units, symbols and spacing
What space stands between a figure and a unit or sign, and who rules it.
Punctuation
Marks and their placement, where communities differ inside otherwise identical sentence structures.
Abbreviation and ordinal punctuation
Whether an abbreviation takes a stop and how an ordinal is marked, and who rules which.
Apostrophe and elision
What the apostrophe separates, marks or omits, and which authority decides.
Dash and parenthesis conventions
Which dash a community uses, whether it is spaced, and what brackets do instead.
Enumeration and list punctuation
How list items open, connect and close, and what the last one is made to do.
Quotation marks and quoted matter
Which marks fence a quotation at each depth, and what may be altered inside.
Capitalization and typography
Capitals, italics, brackets and diacritics: the choices a community has made about the look of its running text.
Capitals in institutions and offices
Which words of a body’s name take a capital, and why the source cannot tell you.
Capitals in instruments and preambles
Which words of an act’s name and its formulae take a capital, and who rules it.
Diacritics in names
Whether a name keeps its diacritics between communities that share an alphabet.
Editorial marks and brackets
How a translator’s own interventions are marked, and who says whether to make them.
Italics and foreign wording
What a community sets in italics, and which parts of a citation never take them.
Citation and reference
How instruments, cases and their parts are pointed at, and which body fixes the form of the pointer.
Case law citation
How a judgment is pointed at, and which part of the citation never converts.
Gazette and act citation
How an act and where it was published are cited, and why the date fixes the form.
Short titles and abbreviated citation
First mention in full, a short form after it, and who owns the short form.
Subdivision numbering and citation
How a provision’s parts are numbered and cited, and who fixes the form.
Register, genre and norms
What the target community expects of a text as a whole: how formal, how distant, how figurative, and what shape the genre takes.
Figurative language restraint
How much figure a genre tolerates, and why no instrument anywhere rules it.
Forms of address
Which address a target readership expects, and who does and does not rule it.
Gender-neutral drafting
What institutional guidance asks of a translation between two gender systems.
Register height and distance
How formal and how impersonal a text type is expected to be, and by how much.
Target genre expectations
The expectation that an arriving text takes the target community’s shape.
Translation norms and conventions
What separates a convention from a norm, and why a reviser needs the difference.