RE: Translation Report Dutch team - Weeks 1 and 2 - Utopian/DaVinci
This is a good update, and I am glad to see that you'll be doing it bi-weekly going forward. It's great to get this view of the category as it progresses.
The post presented a fair bit of information. I do question your formatting decision to center the text. Looking at your blog, I see that is a thing you regularly do, and not a one-time thing. To me, that makes the text harder to read. Partially, that's an issue of habit. I'm used to text that is aligned to the left in English texts, and to the right in Hebrew. I think that's true for most people, though.
There were also minor issues of style and grammar, though the post was well written overall.
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Thank you @didic for your honest review. I truly appreciate it. You could be right about the formatting. I usually write different kinds of posts and usually like this format the best for what I present. It's purely personal really. But I thank you for mentioning it to me, I might even do a poll now to ask about how people like the format LOL. But in a post writing an update and/or review, it probably does look much better to have text on the left. Maybe, unconsciously it is my way of rebelling against the system that made me align my texts to the left for so long, growing up in Germany and the Netherlands, HA! I may be onto something there.
This was my first, I hope to improve on the updates in time.
As for the minor issues of style and grammar, could you let me know where I went wrong? If you don't have the time, then don't worry. I understand you must be extremely busy :)
See? I didn't align to the left here :) I'm tryin'..I'm tryin'😉
Either way: I thank you for the honesty and kind words. 'Well written' is a great compliment.
I'm always happy to provide examples! I've been told that some people get upset by them, so I've been a lot more skimpy with them of late. But since you asked:
"It's been 14 days since the new translation teams formed and people either formed new teams or added to existing teams." That's a loooong sentence. It could be broken in two. At the very least, there should be a comma before "and."
"The object of this post is to tell you a little bit about our Dutch translation team and the work we've been doing so far." Once again, a comma before "and" would have helped. Also, once you've written "the work we've been doing," the addition of "so far" is redundant.
"Since the 2nd of September we have..." Once you use "since," you can't use the present simple of "we have." It should have been "we have had."
These are some examples of the types of errors that appear in the post.
You're absolutely right. The non-use of comma's stems from the Dutch language. We rarely use a comma before 'and' unless it's a REALLY long sentence. But I will be more mindful of that in the future. I know I can write very long sentences...LOL. Thank you, I won't get offended by examples or criticism. I won't be able to change it if no one tells me :) When I worked as a translator, for years I translated into English as well as into Dutch (from German and English) and no one has ever told me to use more comma's (or shorter sentences) so I really appreciate this! Thank you!
If "and" is used to connect two parts of the sentence, you need the comma. Really, the only time you don't put a comma before "and" is if you're listing two things. "Jack and the beanstalk" doesn't need a comma. "I don't like Jack, and I don't like the beanstalk" does.
Yeah, these are things that I know and learned. However somewhere down the line I let it slip. Then, when no one ever mentions it, it will stay with you until someone does.
Thank you for your review, @didic!
So far this week you've reviewed 26 contributions. Keep up the good work!