What are Style Guides?

About Style Guides

Style Guides define and enforce rules on language usage, composition and orthography to improve communication and ensure consistency of your tone and message across all of your languages and markets.

Some elements to include in your Style Guide:

• Tone of voice (formal v. informal)
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Fluency
• Locale conventions.

By creating a Style Guide, you’re committing to a more considered and efficient way of having your content translated. Grammar, punctuation and formatting all contribute to the quality of a translation, and a Style Guide keeps them all in check.

Style Guides become a central repository of your stylistic and tone of voice requirements that can be shared with all parties involved in the translation process. They are an important resource to help with translating at scale.

How Style Guides help translation

The benefits of having a Style Guide in place include:

• Staying in-tune with the target audience makes it clear what language, style and tone to use during the translation process
• Adhering to grammar, punctuation and spelling conventions ensures that the translated content meets the expectations of a professional audience. Common practice is to follow the official grammar, spelling and punctuation rules of the target language
• Helps to integrate your In-Country Review.
• The adaptation of content about a product or message to specific countries, regions or groups applied through comprehensive knowledge of the target culture.

Discover how to build and maintain your Style Guides for translation.