Passive or Active Voice
Passive voice is relatively common in everyday English. However, if Khmer translators use the same voice for Khmer language, it will sound far from natural. Most experienced Khmer translators would try to avoid a passive sentence if they can. This challenge is well found in a sentence such as “it is recommended that you take your pills right after your meal.” Many translators attempt to use the same structure by using the so-call empty subject, “it”. The Khmer result could be confusing or even mislead their readers. The best way to translate such a sentence in Khmer is to under the context by asking “who recommends it”. It is far more natural to use the person or agent that recommends as the starting “subject” in Khmer.
New Tech, But No New Words
Technology becomes an immense challenge for the development of Khmer language. The rise of technology sees the influx of new or re-invented words. Words such as “AI” or “Dashboard” seems to be common words in English these days. However, for Khmer, there is still no uniform equivalence to these terms, and without new words being created by the official channel fast enough to cope with the growth of technology, Khmer translators carry the burden of having to invent ones for their own use, which in most cases, do not always find their best match. For KhmerTranslators.com, we consult some of the trusted authorities in the language including the Royal Academy of Cambodia, Microsoft Terminology and Google Terminology for tech related terminology. The languages used by them are undoubtedly most influential toward users.
Official Spellings vs Widespread (Incorrect) Spellings
Spelling is one of the most confusing aspect in Khmer. Not because a word is too difficult to spell, but because they have been spelled incorrectly for so long that people consider them as correct. The official spellings base on Chuon Nath’s Khmer Dictionary, followed by the Royal Academy of Cambodia for new coined words. The most commonly misspelled words include: ទូរស័ព្ទ (correct spelling: ទូរសព្ទ), អាស័យដ្ឋាន (correct spelling: អាសយដ្ឋាន), សំរាប់ (correct spelling: សម្រាប់), អោយ (correct spelling: ឱ្យ or ឲ្យ) and many more. Some people even consider the wrong as the right spelling since those spelling have been so widespread.
Formatting Khmer Texts
In desktop publishing, we often hear the instruction, “mirror the format of the target to the source language”. It may sound simple but it is not for Khmer. Khmer characters are larger than English while each sentence tends to be made up of more characters than English. The translation of a one-page English text usually produces one and a half pages of Khmer texts if standard fonts are used. This makes keeping the format identical to English relatively challenging and the desktop publisher in charge has to either reduce the font size to below the standard size or to reduce the space between lines, both of which are not ideal from a language user prospective.
Another common issue is the compatibility of the font with the computers that do not have Khmer as a default language. It normally results in corrupted texts, or distorted format (random space, for examples) in the final documents. We are well aware of this issue and have help our partners produce the final documents error free.
Punctuations
Khmer do not always use the same set of punctuations as those in English. For example, a comma (,) is not a common punctuation and we normally replace with space in Khmer texts. A semicolon (;) can be either replaced by space or a khan, the Khmer full stop (។) depending on whether the semicolons are being used to separate phrases or sentences. One of the more confusing use are the quotation marks. It is more common that the English version (“a”) are being used instead of the Khmer version («»). The same is seen in the use of hyphen, en dash and em dash.
Spelling Check Tool
Another challenge faced by Khmer translators is the fact that Khmer does not have a working spell-check tool. There has been some attempts in the past to create one but non has made it to a useable level. Unlike English, there is no help from your Microsoft Word nor Chrome spelling correction when it comes to Khmer spelling and every word has to be checked manually, making the work on large project labor intensive and create a larger margin of misspelling errors. We at KhmerTranslators.com recommend a minimum of two-step process, namely at least translate and edit to avoid the basic issues of misspellings.