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Translators & localizers

Text Cleanup for Translators

Translators receive source text in every condition imaginable: copied from PDFs with broken line breaks, riddled with smart quotes and non-breaking spaces, and salted with invisible characters that confuse CAT-tool segmentation. Cleaning the source before it enters the workflow saves hours of fighting the tool later.

This workflow prepares source text for translation: fix line breaks and whitespace, normalize quotes and Unicode, and remove invisible characters so segmentation and QA behave.

Text Cleanup for Translators workflow

  1. 1

    Repair line breaks

    Remove stray line breaks pasted from PDFs so sentences segment as single units.

  2. 2

    Normalize quotes and whitespace

    Convert smart quotes and collapse odd spacing for consistent source formatting.

  3. 3

    Standardize Unicode

    Normalize accented characters so terminology matches across the project.

  4. 4

    Remove invisible characters

    Strip zero-width characters that break CAT-tool segmentation and QA checks.

Tools for Text Cleanup for Translators

Remove Line Breaks

Fixes PDF-pasted breaks that fragment sentences.

Smart Quote Converter

Normalizes curly quotes to a consistent style.

Unicode Text Normalizer

Standardizes accented characters across the source.

Tips for Translators & localizers

  • Clean source before importing into your CAT tool - fixing segmentation after the fact is far slower.
  • Decide on a quote and dash convention per language pair and normalize to it every time.
  • Watch for zero-width joiners in scripts that use them intentionally - remove selectively.

Questions about Text Cleanup for Translators