Tip 6: Aim for mid-length sentences

Do you know the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Remember how Goldilocks tried the porridge belonging to each bear but found the first bowl to be too hot, the second bowl to be too cold, and the third bowl to be just right? And then she lay in the bed of each bear but found the first bed to be too hard, the second bed to be too soft, and the third bed to be just right? Well in this case, you need to adopt Goldilocks’ perspective and aim to write sentences that are neither too long (over 35 words) nor too short (under seven words), but somewhere in the middle (around 15 to 25 words). Just right!

It’s not hard to understand why long sentences might cause problems for translation. As a reader, it’s easy to lose track of the intended meaning in a sentence that goes on and on and on… But why are short sentences problematic?

Short sentences can be confusing because the relationships between different elements in the sentence could be left implicit rather than being explicitly identified. When something is implicit, it means the reader (or translator or automatic translation tool) needs to figure it out. Since automatic translation tools don’t have access to real-world knowledge or common sense, they might have trouble working out the intended meaning of a short sentence. For instance, the meaning of the short sentence “Filing errors cost” is something along the lines of “When you make a mistaking filing information, it costs the company a lot of money” (for example, in time and effort to find the missing information). And if the automatic translation tool cannot decipher the intended meaning, you could end up with a nonsense translation such as “Coût des erreurs de classement” instead of the intended translation “Les erreurs de classement coûtent cher”.