I don't care for alphabet soup

Nothing says to stakeholders "Go away and don't bother us" like a business report full of arcane internal acronyms that only few company insiders understand.

That acronym-itis has become really bad over the last ten years or so. It is hard to find any company report or document that does not make excessive use of such "code language" – even if it is intended for an external target group of readers.

While most people probably don't care (they'll just skip over anything they don't understand), translators are the ones that suffer the most, because they are expected to make heads or tail of these acronyms and find a suitable "translation" in the target language.

Today I received a job from one of my regular agency clients (a PowerPoint file – they are the worst cases of acronym-itis), but the client, as always, has failed to supply the agency, and me, with a glossary of all those secret codes.

So I informed the agency that I would leave all acronyms as-is, because I am a translator and not a professional crossword-puzzle solver.

Most companies, apparently, are not interested in communicating with the outside world; hence, their secret language. Unless they provide us, their translators, with a decoding key, we shouldn't be expected to spend hours trying to crack DaVinci's Code.

I suggest that all translators should take this approach. Do not translate acronyms and other unfathomable abbreviations (except common ones, of course, that anyone could be expected to know) unless the client provides a detailed glossary.

Perhaps, they will catch on once they're stuck with vital business documents parts of which don't make sense at all in the translation.