Find the English that already exists: terminology and quotations
Some of the words in your English manuscript were never yours to translate. Your field named them in English first, and the book you are quoting was written in English. Here is how to find what already exists, and what machine translation does when you skip that step.
An English-language manuscript is full of words that were never yours to translate. The term your field settled on decades ago. The sentence you are quoting from a book that was written in English in the first place. Get those wrong and a reviewer notices before reaching your argument.
Your field already named these things in English
Look the term up. Translating it yourself produces a word your readers have never seen.
Two examples show how wide the gap gets.
Management studies: Polish uses renta pierwszeństwa. English uses first-mover advantage. A word-by-word rendering gives priority annuity, and that phrase really does turn up in badly translated publications. No management journal uses it. A specialist reads it as something to do with pension payments.
Linguistics: Polish uses fortunność. English speech act theory uses felicity, in the phrase felicity conditions, which J. L. Austin introduced. A word-by-word rendering gives fortune, and the reader starts thinking about luck.
Both mistakes are invisible to the person who made them. That is what makes them expensive.
So check twice. Search the term in English-language journals in your field and see what the literature actually says. Then check Wikipedia. It will not go in your bibliography, but it shows fast which English term the field has agreed on.
Machine translation guesses at terminology
AI tools render technical vocabulary literally. They have no way of knowing that your discipline picked a different word 40 years ago and stuck with it.
Take the Polish aktualizacja in writing about Aristotle. Machine translation returns update. The English vocabulary here is actuality and actualization, depending on whether you mean the state or the process. A reader who meets update in a paper on Aristotle stops reading and starts doubting everything else on the page.
Long sentences are the other casualty. Academic prose stacks subordinate clauses, and machine translation flattens the relationships between them or quietly reverses one. The output is grammatical. The meaning has moved.
Read every machine-translated passage against the source. When a term looks uncertain, ask somebody who works in that field.
Quotations belong in the language they were written in
A quotation that travels into your language and back comes out as a sentence the author never wrote, and the page number you give points at an edition your reader cannot open. Go to the English original. For a source in a third language, the standard English version your field cites carries the pages you need.
This is the error that costs the most credibility for the least effort.
You are writing about a book published in English. You read it in translation. You quote your translation, then render that quotation back into English for your manuscript.
Your paper now contains a sentence the author never wrote. Any reviewer who knows the book sees it immediately. The page number you give points at an edition your reader does not have on the shelf.
Find the original. JSTOR and Google Books will usually take you to the exact page in a few minutes.
The same rule covers sources written in a third language: quote the standard English translation your field cites, and give that edition's pages.
Save the publisher's house style for last
House style is the publisher’s own rules for punctuation, footnote format, bibliographic abbreviations and how titles are set. Those rules are mechanical, so they come after the terminology and the quotations are settled. Otherwise you format the manuscript once, fix the substance, and format the whole thing again.
Every publisher has its own rules for quotation marks, dashes, footnote format, bibliographic abbreviations and how titles are set. These rules matter, and they are mechanical.
Do them once the terminology and the quotations are settled. Reformatting a whole manuscript twice is a poor use of a week.
Two related questions sit outside this checklist. Whether the passive voice belongs in your sentences is one, and I wrote about what British and American style authorities actually say about it. How much of your own voice a discipline permits is the other, and that belongs with the cultural assumptions buried in academic translation.
The three checks before you send
Verify every field-specific term against English-language literature, and trace every quotation to the edition it was written in, with that edition’s pages. Then read each machine-translated passage against its source before the manuscript goes out. None of this is hard, and a reviewer tests it first.
- Every field-specific term verified against English-language literature in your field.
- Every quotation traced back to the edition it was written in, with that edition's page numbers.
- Every machine-translated passage read against the source text.
None of the three is difficult. All of them are tedious, and all of them are the first thing a reviewer tests.
If you would rather somebody else ran those checks, Mowa does exactly this work on academic manuscripts. Write to us and request a quote.