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<\/p>\nTranslating from and to many languages brings about lots of interesting facts, increases curiosity and reveals things most people would hardly think twice about. Well we do, so why not share some the know-how?<\/p>\n
For instance, we regularly work with translation into English\u00a0\u2013 who doesn’t,\u00a0to be honest \ud83d\ude42 \u2013 and handle both British English and English for the U.S. market. While it is common knowledge that U.K. and U.S. English differ slightly in spelling and also between certain expressions, the two tongues also have very different approaches to the use of Initial Capitals, i.e. the custom of capitalizing the first letter of every word in headers and sub-headers.<\/p>\n
To roughly sum it up, people generally favor the use of initial capitals\u00a0in the U.S., while in the U.K. there is a tendency to avoid them. If you open a newspaper from the U.S. and one from the U.K., this becomes obvious (well illustrated by the picture on the right). To a translator, the issue is trivial, but if you publish documents for English readers in general and there is no target market, it may be worth to reconsider the use of initial caps in headers.<\/p>\n
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Having noted that Americans like to use initial caps in titles, while the British try to avoid them,\u00a0for International English we recommend not to use initial caps<\/strong>, because it makes it difficult to balance the heading levels that should have initial caps and those that should not. It is difficult to keep respecting the rule and even more difficult to unify all headers throughout documents and between projects. Further, when writing International English text for a worldwide audience, it is easy to make mistakes if initial caps are used, which is another good reason for advocating the British preference. As to the general opinion of the British that initial caps usage appears ugly, we won\u2019t comment. But let’s admit that caps overuse can confuse and distract the reader, a fact that eventually will affect the level of understanding the context and slow down the reading speed. You really don’t want your target text to appear that way to the reader \u2013 at least not if we talk promotional material.<\/p>\n We do, however, agree with and encourage the use of initial caps in proper names, including product names and to some extent special part names, as well as in key phrases, e.g. catch phrases. This includes also titles (e.g. on book covers – as on the picture on the right).<\/p>\n If you are really stuck and can’t make up your mind, there is always an easy way out: Simply capitalize all your headers and reduce the point size to avoid them dominating the content.<\/p>\nWhen to use initial caps?<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nThe easy way out<\/h3>\n