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I proofread technical documents that have been translated from Japanese into English. The translations must be "literal." I cannot, generally, make them more concise. One thing that pops up over...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/12589 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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I proofread technical documents that have been translated from Japanese into English. The translations must be "literal." I cannot, generally, make them more concise. One thing that pops up over and over are the dreaded -ing words. I can make the argument that a phrase should be changed if the construction makes it difficult to understand. Here is an example "For separating connector A and connector B, the worker first must......" My gut and all my writing baggage really want it to say "In order to separate..." but I cannot articulate why. Can someone point me to a concise explanation that would make sense to non-native speakers? Feel free to tell me this is a "happy" to "glad" change and I will attempt to stop sweating it.