Goal: Grammatically structure the text to fit your language
Note: Restructure the sentences so constituents roughly match your word order.
Tip: This is just the first pass. Highlight areas you want to focus on later.
Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure
Restructure the text you selected so that it roughly matches the expected word order of your language. This is just your first pass, so it will be a rough alignment.
For instance, let’s say you want to translate the sentence “Poirot bowed his head gravely but said nothing.” A language with SOV word order might structure that same sentence like this: “Poirot his head gravely bowed but nothing said.” A VSO language might structure it as “Bowed gravely Poirot head his but said (he) nothing.” Even an SVO language may slightly alter the expected order, with something like “Poirot bowed gravely head his but said nothing.” For now just focus on grammatical structures. Later passes will focus on semantics.
As you work, though, highlight any areas that catch your attention (where, for instance, an adposition phrase in English might need to be expressed through verb choice in your language). You will work on ironing out those features in the upcoming days.
This first pass is intended to give you time to familiarize yourself with what’s actually there in the text, with the grammatical structures that you will need to consider as you dive deeper into the text during the translation process. Keep your template basic for now—the fine-tuned grammatical features (e.g. tense/aspect) will be added once you’ve ironed out what words and structures you will actually use in your translation.