Conventions

Where a language system leaves options open, the target community has usually chosen among them: a decimal mark, a quotation mark, a capital, a form of citation, a register. This section sets out those choices, names who holds each one and says what would have to change for it to change, from the orthography codes that bind a whole language community, through the drafting manuals and style guides that bind one body's texts, to the expectations that nothing written enforces. Each entry states whether a deviation is an error, a finding inside one institution's work, or a text that merely reads as foreign.

Looking for the operation that carries an expectation out, for the structural difference behind a shift, for how the concept behind a term is designated, or for the wording that was fixed in advance? See Translation techniques or Language structures or Terminology or Phraseology.

Reference

Category

Codification

25 entries

Notation and units

How a community writes numbers, dates, money and measures, and the conversion a translation owes where two communities disagree about the same string.

Punctuation

Marks and their placement, where communities differ inside otherwise identical sentence structures.

Capitalization and typography

Capitals, italics, brackets and diacritics: the choices a community has made about the look of its running text.

Citation and reference

How instruments, cases and their parts are pointed at, and which body fixes the form of the pointer.

Register, genre and norms

What the target community expects of a text as a whole: how formal, how distant, how figurative, and what shape the genre takes.

Conventions, and whose they are

A Translyta delivery names the authority a convention answers to, so a reviser can tell an error from a house preference instead of guessing which of the two is in front of them.

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