Why your heroine's name changes halfway through the translation

Authors receiving a translation of their book imagine the problem will be a ridiculous sentence. In practice the most common fault is much quieter: the heroine's name is spelled one way at the start of the book and another way in the middle. The same thing happens to a city name, a character's nickname, and any term that recurs throughout.

Why it happens at all

A book is a long text, so it gets translated in parts — whether a human translator works through it over months, or software translates it section by section. In each of those parts a small decision gets made again: how do we spell this name in the new language.

For most names there is no single right answer. Sara can be Sara or Sarah. A city can keep its local name or take its English one. Each choice is reasonable on its own. The problem is born only when the choice changes midway.

Why it bothers a reader

A reader who meets two forms of the same name does not always work out what happened, but they feel something. Sometimes they think there are two characters. Sometimes they simply stop for a second. It is not a dramatic failure, yet it is precisely the sensation that makes a book read as if nobody edited it.

And names are only the visible case. The same happens to a professional term rendered three ways in three chapters, or to a character's title — the rabbi, the priest, the teacher — that changes for no reason.

What actually solves it

Not the translator's talent, and not new technology. What solves it is a list.

Before translation begins, you write one page: character names in the chosen spelling, place names, terms that recur in the book, and words that should not be translated at all. That page stays in front of whoever is translating, from the first chapter to the last, so no decision has to be made afresh each time.

It sounds too simple, and it genuinely is that simple. Most books manage with twenty lines. If you are commissioning a translation from any provider, ask them how they keep it consistent across a whole book — the answer will tell you a great deal.

The check you can run yourself

This is one of the few checks you can run in a language you cannot read, because it needs searching rather than understanding.

Open the translated file, pick five names and five important terms, and search for each one. You are looking for a single thing: whether anything appears in two forms. If it does, you have found a real problem, and it is worth asking for it to be corrected across the whole book rather than only where you spotted it.

More on the difference between approaches: a human translator versus AI. And the other checks that work without the language: how to check a translation in a language you cannot read.