Style rules and glossary for English-to-Spanish journalism translation, developed from years of professional practice.
This style guide was developed by Yuli Delgado through her work leading the Spanish Translation News Service (STNS) at the Center for Cooperative Media, Montclair State University. It reflects translation decisions made across hundreds of professionally translated NJ news articles and is designed for newsrooms doing English-to-Spanish journalism translation for US Hispanic audiences.
Yuli runs the Spanish Translation News Service at the Center for Cooperative Media, which translates NJ journalism into Spanish for partner newsrooms and communities across the state. The style guide and glossary on this page represent the editorial standards developed through that work.
The glossary was extracted from the STNS translation archive using a three-phase corpus analysis pipeline. Every term pair reflects a real translation decision made by a professional translator.
214 articles were not included — older documents no longer accessible via their original Drive links. Only confirmed professionally translated articles from the STNS Airtable base were used. The Hawk translation API applies this glossary to every Spanish machine draft before human review.
Analyzing the full archive revealed consistent practices — and some interesting differences from written rules. These findings come from how translators actually wrote, not from prescriptive guidelines.
In running body text, translators consistently wrote "Estados Unidos" or "estadounidense" — not the abbreviated form. "EE. UU." is appropriate for tight contexts (datelines, headlines) but prose prefers the full form.
la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidosel Departamento de Salud estadounidenseTranslators correctly avoided "billón" (which means a trillion in Spanish) and consistently wrote "mil millones" for 1 billion. Dollar amounts kept the $ sign.
$3,300 millones · $25.5 mil millonesThe most frequent attribution verb beyond "dijo" was "afirmó." Translators showed good variety: señaló, indicó, explicó, añadió, and sostuvo all appeared regularly.
afirmó · señaló · explicó · añadióEvery article used "Nueva Jersey" in body text. Other Spanish-form state names appeared correctly. Publication names (NJ.com, NorthJersey.com) stayed in English.
en Nueva Jersey · en Nueva YorkWages, distances, and temperatures all stayed in US format. This is consistent with the guide's rule: keep US measurements for a US Hispanic audience.
$15.49 por hora · $13.40 por horaCharter schools appear as "escuelas chárter" (with accent) — a consistent Hispanicization not explicitly in the existing style guide. Worth adding as a rule.
escuelas chárterAcronym expansion on first use was inconsistent. SNAP sometimes appeared with full Spanish expansion; ICE was almost always used as-is. The guide rule exists but practice varied.
ICE · SNAP (formalmente llamado el Programa...)The most frequent domain-specific phrase in the corpus after place names. "Inmigrantes sin estatus legal" was preferred over "indocumentados" in several articles.
redadas de ICE · agentes de ICEThese rules come from Yuli Delgado's original style guide for the STNS project, based on the RAE, Fundéu, and federal bilingual style standards. The Hawk API applies these rules to every Spanish machine draft before human review.
El informe señala: "Los resultados...""¡Es urgente!".mil millones (never "billón")1,300 millones (not "1.3 mil millones")$1,276.50(ICE, por sus siglas en inglés)UnescoEstados Unidos or estadounidenseEE. UU. (spaces after each period)Nueva Jersey, Nueva York, Nuevo México, Pensilvania, Oregón, Míchigan, Hawái, Luisiana, Misuri, Misisipiy/o — use only "o"expresidente, socioculturalanti-Brexit, pro-LGTBQexpresó, mencionó, comentó, afirmó, declaró, manifestó, señaló, explicó, añadió, sostuvopermiso humanitarioServicio de Control de Inmigración y AduanasUnión Estadounidense por las Libertades Civilesrepublicanoescuelas chárter266 term pairs extracted from 506 professionally translated articles. Frequency reflects how many distinct articles used each translation choice. Click any column header to sort.
| English term | Spanish translation | Category | Frequency |
|---|
Frequency = number of distinct articles in the corpus where this translation appeared. Terms with frequency ≥ 2 reflect consistent choices across multiple articles and translators.
Terminología y consejos de cobertura para comunidades LGBTQIA+
Esta sección es un recurso separado de la guía de estilo de Yuli Delgado que aparece arriba. Fue publicada por la Asociación Nacional de Periodistas Hispanos (NAHJ) con el apoyo de la Asociación Nacional de Periodistas Lesbianas y Gays (NLGJA).
105 términos extraídos del manual NAHJ. Busca por término o definición, filtra por letra.