Best practices for content creation

Implementing certain good practices for content creation allows you to:

• reduce costs
• improve the perception of your brand
• sell more

A good return for such a small investment.

Creating style guides

In order to establish basic common rules for all writers, it is useful to create a style guide. What should be included in a style guide? In this post, we will cover some points that you may find very useful.

If your documentation will be translated into other languages, then it is best to create style guides for each of those languages. That way you will not only create uniform and consistent content in the source language, but also in all of the target languages. Your translation provider or someone from your company with the relevant language skills can complete this task. This not only ensures the quality of the translations, but also makes you less dependent on your translation provider.

Brevity is the soul of wit

Or in other words, keep it simple, stupid! (KISS). Use short sentences (maximum 10-15 words) to facilitate understanding of the writing. Sentences that are too long cause the reader to lose concentration and what is important gets lost, i.e. the content.

An image is worth a thousand words

Sometimes an image is much more effective for explaining something than a verbal description. Another advantage of this is that images do not need to be translated.

Punctuation

Always use the correct punctuation at the end of the sentence (. ! ?).

These punctuation signs at the end of the sentence are used by translation memories to divide texts into segments (sentences). Without this segmentation, there is no reuse and without reuse, there are no cost savings.

EUUAA

The Excessive Use of Unnecessary Abbreviations and Acronyms also makes it harder to understand the text, especially in the case of acronyms that are not fully established. If you have to use them, it is best to list them with an explanation. In particular, it is best to avoid random abbreviations that end in a full stop. These abbreviations can confuse the translation memory, because the memory interprets the full stop as the end of the sentence. As a result, the translation memory segments the sentence incorrectly, thus reducing the possibility of reuse.

Ambiguities

Try to avoid ambiguities, for e.g. “Japanese car dealerships”.

Managing terminology

When writing content, define the keywords or terms of the text and save these terms in a database.

This list of terms has multiple purposes:

• Create a multilingual corporate terminological dictionary (or expand one that you already have), with the aim of structuring subsequent translations.
• Create the basis for a table of contents for the publication that you are creating and define the cross references nodes.
• Create the basis for keywords that you want to use on your website. This list can be used for a systematic study of keywords (search frequency, alternative keywords, etc.). Such a study is essential for improving the positioning of your website in search engines (SEO or Search Engine Optimisation).

Thank you for reading! We look forward to receiving your comments and suggestions for future posts.