'Spelling and typographic orthography'

[Michael Rowley]

I'm working on a proposed standard for assessment of translations, and one of the categories of error is labelled 'Spelling and typographic orthography'. I'm wondering what is meant by 'typographic orthography'. What does it mean to you?

[ktinkel]

Originally Posted by Michael Rowley

I'm working on a proposed standard for assessment of translations, and one of the categories of error is labelled 'Spelling and typographic orthography'. I'm wondering what is meant by 'typographic orthography'. What does it mean to you?

I am tempted to call it gobbledygook since orthography and typography may be companions but are sort of opposite. They are both somewhat grand terms though,

Maybe it refers to rules of hyphenation, corporate design/typographic styles, something like that.

[Michael Rowley]

KT:

Maybe it refers to rules of hyphenation, corporate design/typographic styles, something like that

I've now remembered that in a previous European standard typographic orthography was described as 'orthotypography', a fairly well-known word in French, which has also been described as 'typographic syntax'. It is pretty well described (originally in French or Finnish) by the author of this text, which has been published in English here:

http://www.uta.fi/~trjusc/vancouver.htm

I remember now too that I asked about orthotypography here in 2006, and got essentially the same reply as today: 'gobbledygook'; but perhaps someone else has heard of it.

[ktinkel]

Using the terms “print-ready” or “ready-to-publish” makes the meaning much clearer than “typographic orthography.”

I can see many problems with this. Even republishing an English book in North America (or vice-versa) requires different hyphenation dictionaries, different spellings, and different rules for quotations, em dashes, and other ordinary features.

As a designer, on several occasions I had to create a pamphlet in three languages. The client said the panels had to be the same size, the typeface, size, and leading the same, and the same topic had to be in the same place in all three versions whether in English, French, or Spanish. These languages simply do not work out that way, or not without a lot of tweaking.

So I can only imagine what magic bucket these people have discovered so that a translator — not necessarily also a typographer, page designer, etc. — could just pour in a translated text and have it print out page-for-page as the original.

[Michael Rowley]

KT:

The client said the panels had to be the same size, the typeface, size, and leading the same

In a paper Gabe Bokor shows an instance where that very thing was required in Spanish translated for English; the text needed to be turned upside down—see:

http://accurapid.com/journal/03type.htm

In his paper, Gabe also points out that a translated text needs to be set by someone who knows the 'orthotypography' (but he doesn't use that word) of the country it is to appear in.

But a translator can't be expected to know more than a someone that is pretty knowledgeble about typography, though not an expert.

[LoisWakeman]

Ah: now I know what you are talking about (I think): syntactic rules for how to use punctuation in different languages; e.g. English and European style double quotes, decimal points, spaces before/after colons etc. Not to mention upside down interrogation marks in some Mediterranean languages. Is that right?

And that's before we start worrying about the Oxford comma.

[Michael Rowley]

Lois:

Ah: now I know what you are talking about (I think): syntactic rules for how to use punctuation in different languages; e.g. English and European style double quotes, decimal points, spaces before/after colons etc. Not to mention upside down interrogation marks in some Mediterranean languages. Is that right?

Well, those are some of the things reckoned to belong to syntax. But even those don't take account of changing tastes and fashions. Take spaces before colons (and semicolons): a book published in England, for example, almost always had a pretty large space before a colon only sixty years ago; where's the distinction from French books? Then, the lay reader didn't notice it, but the same reader would certainly think it looked odd.

[Richard Waller]

Originally Posted by ktinkel

panels had to be the same size, the typeface, size, and leading the same, and the same topic had to be in the same place

I had a parallel problem when I wrote a manual for IBM about IT Standards. I wanted each topic to be complete on a page, and I had a lot of argument with the publisher on where the page breaks would be allowed. The result was definitely up to my expectations and I got an achievment award, and the manual was a best seller.

I had forgotten that exercise. Apparently I have achieved something in my life.

[Howard Allen]

I'm not sure I completely understand the concept you're driving at, but there are some typographic conventions that must be followed in certain types of text, and that may be important in translation. I'm thinking of the requirement to italicize biological genus and species names (and the use of correct capitalization) in scientific writing. I believe this is standardized across the languages that use Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, but I'm not sure how this works in Arabic or Chinese, for instance (though I've seen Chinese/Japanese papers that insert the names in italicized Roman text--"Roman" in the sense of alphabet, not typeface).

[Michael Rowley]

Howard:

I'm thinking of the requirement to italicize biological genus and species names (and the use of correct capitalization) in scientific writing.

That shouldn't be a problem for translators, since the rules are the same in every language—and I don't know about China, but Japanese journals use Latin scripts for scientific names etc. However, when I worked in Germany, there was much less attention paid about what sort of things were printed italic an what not; but that was a long time ago, and the firm's printing shop, although very expert, hated using italic because the line-setting equipment (Intertype, I think) had matrices for either roman/bold or roman/italic, and the operators had to use bold for subheadings.

However, if you ever ventured into biology, you will know the three slightly different conventions for botany, zoology, and microbiology.

You'd think that tranlators need to know no more than any other class of author, but whereas every other author can rely on an editor for putting in the correct punctuation and mark-up, transators are often relied on to do the whole job.