Quotation marks and quoted matter

What it is

A quotation is fenced off from the sentence carrying it, and the fence is a pair of marks. Which marks they are, what a pair inside them looks like, and where the carrier sentence's stop falls against the closing mark are three decisions, not one.

Nothing in these languages compels any of them. The same structure can be fenced with angular marks, with a low opening mark and a raised closing one, or with a single pair, and the stop can stand inside the fence or outside it. What varies is not what the grammar permits but what an authority has settled.

The wording quoted belongs elsewhere: where it is a fixed formula, the phraseology section owns the string and this record owns the marks around it. The joint with the apostrophe record runs through Turkish, whose code writes a suffix straight onto a quoted title without the apostrophe that suffix would otherwise take.

Where the expectation comes from

Three of the four communities below have an authority that claims quotation marks and can be cited by rule number; the fourth has none, and the tier follows the languages the examples are built on.

• Spanish. The Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, the Academies' joint work, names the comillas angulares, the inglesas and the simples, recommends the angular pair first in print, and nests them in that order. Its placement rule at 3.a is absolute: the full stop, comma, semicolon and colon are always written after the closing mark, and it shuts the obvious loophole by adding that this holds where the quoted matter is the whole utterance.
• German. The Amtliches Regelwerk of the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, binding since 1 July 2024, treats quotation marks at one paragraph, § 79 of chapter E, whose note E2 sets a quotation inside a quotation in halbe Anführungszeichen. The Council states the reach itself: the code rules spelling inside the institutions for which the state holds regulatory competence, school and administration, and is a guideline beyond them. Duden carries the same substance at D 9 and D 12, but those are Duden's own numbers, it says of itself that it rests on the official rules, and D 12 points back to § 79 E2. The House line runs inside a single language here.
• Turkish. The Türk Dil Kurumu's writing rules put an inner quotation in the single mark and keep the closing punctuation of the quoted passage inside the fence.
• English. No orthography authority exists, so the English rules are a named body's: the English Style Guide sets single marks outside with double inside at 2.30, and at 2.31 puts the closing mark before the concluding stop unless the quotation ends itself.

Consequences for translation

Determinate once the target community is known, which is what the conversion claim rests on; the traps are in the second decision and the third.

• The marks and the stop are two conversions. Spanish always puts it outside, Turkish keeps it inside, English puts it outside unless the quoted sentence ends itself, German after the mark when it belongs to the carrier sentence. Converting the fence and leaving the stop where the source had it is the commonest half-conversion in this class.
• The error hides at the second depth: convert the outer pair, forget the inner one, and the result carries a mark the target system uses at another level.
• What stands inside the fence is not converted. The English guide draws that line at 1.2: a direct quotation reproduces the original instead of following the conventions the rest of the guide sets out, errors are marked with [sic], and anything supplied goes in the square brackets 2.21 reserves. The guide ruling the marks rules itself out of the matter between them.
• Where the target community has a code, a wrong mark is a finding rather than a preference, and it can be checked without judgement.

Examples

EN>DE

• Source: (1) 'public documents' means:
• Target: 1. „öffentliche Urkunden“:
• Comment: Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, Article 3, in two official versions opened together. The German fence is a low opening mark and a raised closing one, the pair the code lays down for the community, not one the institution chose. A translator carrying the English single marks across would have written a pair German does not use at this depth.

EN>ES

• Source: (1) 'public documents' means:
• Target: 1) «documentos públicos»:
• Comment: The same provision in the Spanish version, taking the angular marks the Academies recommend first. The English pair is what Spanish calls the comillas inglesas and keeps for the second depth, so a translator reasoning from the source has not chosen a wrong mark but the right mark at the wrong level. The nested French title at punto 1(a) is fenced the same way.

References

• Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2.ª edición. Real Academia Española and Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, entry "comillas", section 3.a, read at rae.es, with the statement of the work's own character on its explanatory page.
• Türk Dil Kurumu, Yazım Kuralları, Noktalama İşaretleri, the sections Tırnak İşareti and Tek Tırnak İşareti, read at tdk.gov.tr.
• Duden, Rechtschreibregeln, Anführungszeichen, D 9 (Punkt) and D 12 (halbe Anführungszeichen), read at duden.de.
• English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 21 November 2025. Sections 1.2 (Quoting text), 2.21 (Square brackets), 2.30 (Double vs single quotation marks) and 2.31 (Placing of quotation marks).
• Amtliches Regelwerk der deutschen Rechtschreibung, Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis. Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, on the Council's decision of 15 December 2023, in force 1 July 2024. Chapter E (Zeichensetzung), section 8, § 79 with note E2, read in the edition published by the Council's own secretariat at the Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache; the statement of reach read on the Council's site.
• Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2016 on promoting the free movement of citizens by simplifying the requirements for presenting certain public documents in the European Union, English, German and Spanish language versions, Article 3, points (1) and (2).