How to write to accommodate subsequent automatic translation
The texts I am writing will be translated by people who are not experts in the topic and in some cases by a machine with next to none human editing afterwards.
What strategies should I employ to ensure that the final reader will be able to make sense of it?
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You can't guarantee the reader will make sense of your translated text without a layer of human intervention.
If anything, you should have two: one who is an expert in the field, to make sure content wasn't lost in translation, and one to read for native-language coherence.
Translating text is not like changing fonts. You must have a human read it at some point. A machine may perfectly render "Sei una testa di cipuda" into "You are an onion-head," but it loses the actual sense of "You're an idiot." Or "calzaiuolo," which literally means a cobbler or shoemaker, but has the slang sense of "has bigoted social attitudes stuck in the past."
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