Discovery & Constraints

• Content type: Educational article
• Audience: Japanese learners (beginner—intermediate) with no formal linguistic training
• Primary constraint: Different syntax structures across all three languages for meta-linguistic topic

Terminology Focus

• Grammatical concepts:
  • Simple and complex sentences
  • Clauses and their elements
  • Embedded and relative clauses
• Decisions:
  • Translate Japanese examples independently of existing English version
  • Rewrite examples that rely on English grammar to fit Spanish grammar instead, disregarding literalness
  • Only rewrite as little as possible to convey the desired information.

Decision Writing

• It was decided to use the “tú” form of Spanish conjugation for the explanations, while minimizing pronoun use to avoid over-familiarity. This choice was made because it is the most universal second-person conjugation across the Spanish-speaking world, and because the other forms can often be conjugated in ways that may be misinterpreted for third person given the wrong circumstances.
• The choice was also made to transliterate meta-linguistic language directly from English; it was determined that while equivalent vocabulary exists in Spanish, taking advantage of its universality would require a deeper understanding of grammar than can be expected from the average reader of the article, and would obscure rather than clarify the underlying concepts.