Format C:\ Dates

Dates are unavoidable, unless you’re not showering and changing your pants regularly, or you already have a Mister or Mrs. Translator in your life. Wait a second, wrong blog.

Dates are unavoidable, mostly because knowing the date is very handy and lots of people insist on putting them in their documents. As with most languagey things, different countries write dates in different ways, so in this, the first of our formatting and punctuation items, we’re going to look and see how they’re done in the English-speaking world.

Commonly, many translators overlook small details like formatting of numbers and dates, and so I see a lot of this kind of thing in PL>EN translations:

1a     Warsaw, 26.09.2005r.         
2a     London, 26 September 2005
3a     The next meeting will be held on 26 September, at 5pm.
4a      2011/02/28

5a     (Journal of Laws of 2007r. No. 223, item 1655)

Ideally, I should be seeing this:

1b     Warsaw, 26/09/2005
2b     London, 26th September 2005
3b     The next meeting will be held on the 26th of September, at 5pm.
4b     28/02/2011

5b     (Journal of Laws of 2007 No. 223, item 1655)

As with many such formatting issues, it’s fairly simple to fix them, or not do them in the first place, and perhaps this is the problem. When one’s brain is full of complex linguistic issues and solutions, something small and biedny like the difference between a full stop and a solidus      is easy to overlook. Try to remember anyway, because as I will often say here, there will be many times (if not most of the time) when you’ll only have your own checks standing between you and FAIL if a particularly edgy client or uptight agency coordinator spots an error and doesn’t like it. Here are the fixes then:

Remember to change the full stops in dates to solidii (1). Add a 'th' or 'st' as appropriate when the date is given at top of a letter or document (2). This improves the reading flow, is stylistically correct, and just sounds right. I say that because those tiny contractions are actually spoken sounds too, and if we’re writing in full, we must reproduce all the sounds of the spoken version (unless the speaker was choking on a biscuit at the time).

In full sentences, where a date is specified, we must write the date out as fully as possible, using ‘the’, ‘of’ and the speaker’s th or st after the number. (3) If you’re writing for American readers, you can leave it all out though as our trans-Atlantic friends are not as fussy as the Brits about such niceties.

Again, this is okay for American English, but British English puts the date in ascending order – day, month, year (4). This is a small point which is actually part of a much larger and more interesting topic, that of when and where to use US or UK English. We’ll come to that in a later article, but for now my basic advice is to use the UK date order if you’re writing for Australians, Brits or Europeans. Not sure about Canadians, they may or may not like it UK-style too. If anyone knows for sure, feel free to comment below or drop me an email.

Finally, a very specific thing – it’s all too easy to overlook the occasional r. on your years, esp. In large bodies of text or in a (Dz.U. blah blah blah) (5). Keep your head windows peeled for lurking roks!

If you can accommodate any of this advice in your translating routine, it will soon become second nature and will be one less thing for moaning, un-datable people to cry about, and one more thing guaranteeing you a few more pennies for your work. And that’s no bad thing is it?