Tip 3: Avoid abbreviated forms

Abbreviations are shortened forms of words and we use them quite often when writing in order to save time and effort. However, the overuse or combination of too many abbreviated forms creates a sort of alphabet soup that can be challenging to decipher. While people may be able to piece together the intended meaning of an abbreviated form by using common sense or the surrounding context, these options are not available to an automatic translation tool, which doesn’t understand anything. Therefore, abbreviated forms can cause a number of problems for automatic translation.

Some abbreviations can refer to more than one long form (for example, St. can mean either Street or Saint). Others may be confused with a word (for example, in could mean the preposition in or the shortened form of inch). Acronyms, which combine the first letter of all the words in a phrase, are frequently written in all caps, but the newly formed word could be confused with an existing word (for example, does PIN mean personal identification number, or is it simply the word pin written in all caps?).

Another challenge is that some shortened forms do not have an official translation in another language, and so they should remain in the original language. For example, rather than having a different short form in each language, the short form ISO is used to denote the International Organization for Standardization in all languages. Therefore, it does not become IOS in English or OIN in French (for Organisation internationale de normalisation). Rather, it should always remain ISO regardless of the language in question. Because automatic translation tools are not smart, they may run into problems when they encounter and try to translate abbreviated forms.