Translating from and to many languages brings about lots of interesting facts, increases curiosity and reveals things most people would hardly think twice about. Well we do, so why not share some the know-how?
For instance, we regularly work with translation
into English – who doesn't, to be honest :) – and handle both British English and
English for the U.S. market. While it
is common knowledge that U.K. and
U.S. English differ slightly in spelling
and also between certain expressions,
the two tongues also have very different approaches
to the use of Initial Capitals,
i.e. the custom of capitalizing the first
letter of every word in headers and
sub-headers.
The British keep it subtle, Americans Like it Big
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British vs. American use of Capitals |
To roughly sum it up, people generally favor the
use of initial capitals in the U.S., while in the U.K.
there is a tendency to avoid them. If you
open a newspaper from the U.S. and
one from the U.K., this becomes obvious (well illustrated by the picture on the right).
To a translator, the issue is trivial, but
if you publish documents for English
readers in general and there is no target
market, it may be worth to reconsider
the use of initial caps in headers.
Avoid international Caps schizophrenia
Having noted that Americans like to
use initial caps in titles, while the British
try to avoid them, for International
English we recommend not to use initial
caps, because it makes it difficult to
balance the heading levels that should
have initial caps and those that should
not. It is difficult to keep respecting
the rule and even more difficult to
unify all headers throughout documents
and between projects. Further, when
writing International English text for
a worldwide audience, it is easy to make
mistakes if initial caps are used, which
is another good reason for advocating
the British preference.
As to the general opinion of the British
that initial caps usage appears ugly,
we won’t comment. But let's admit that caps overuse can confuse and distract the
reader, a fact that eventually will affect
the level of understanding the context
and slow down the reading speed. You really don't want your target text to appear that way to the reader – at least not if we talk promotional material.
When to use initial caps?
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Available on Amazon |
The easy way out
If you are really stuck and can't make up your mind, there is always an easy way out: Simply capitalize all your headers and reduce the point size to avoid them dominating the content.
For other translation and localization tips, language facts and curiosities, keep tracking our blog!
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