Language Standards

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, +256 784 464178.

Select and enforce one declared language standard while preserving procurement meaning, proposer voice, and culturally appropriate professional register.

Use When

• Draft, translate, or review proposal content in English, French, or Kiswahili.
• Reconcile multilingual terminology, dates, numbers, courtesy, headings, or calls to action.

Do Not Use When

• Use east-african-english for English-only tone and idiom work that does not need multilingual routing.
• Do not translate legal, statutory, technical, or procurement terms without a verified source or qualified reviewer.

Inputs

Outputs

Evidence Produced

Capability Contract

Read and search are required. Editing is allowed only for authorised drafting or language correction. External translation services, network verification, publishing, certification of translation, and submission require explicit authority.

Degraded Mode

Fallback: when a qualified reviewer, approved glossary, source wording, or verification capability is unavailable, return the narrowest useful qualified translation, mark affected terminology not assessed, and do not certify accuracy.

Decision Rules

Workflow

1. Identify the source language, target language, audience, country context, and mandatory wording.
2. Select the matching section of the multilingual guide and establish approved terminology.
3. Draft or review for meaning before polishing grammar, courtesy, spelling, dates, and numbers.
4. Stop when a legal, statutory, technical, or procurement term cannot be verified.
5. Recover by retaining the source term, flagging it for a qualified reviewer, or narrowing the output.
6. Run a consistency pass across headings, tables, repeated terms, figures, and calls to action.

Quality Standards

• Translation preserves obligation, qualification, uncertainty, price, date, and named-entity meaning.
• Tone is formal and natural for the declared locale, without machine-translation residue or invented cultural claims.

Anti-Patterns

• Mixing British and American spelling in one proposal. Fix: select the declared standard and run a consistency pass.
• Translating an official programme name freely. Fix: use the buyer's published wording.
• Using conversational Kiswahili in a formal tender. Fix: apply standard professional register and verify specialist terms.
• Copying English sentence structure into French. Fix: recast the sentence naturally without changing its obligation.
• Certifying a translation without a qualified reviewer. Fix: mark reviewer-dependent accuracy not assessed.

Worked Example

For a Ugandan technical proposal, write “programme”, “organisation”, and “mobilisation”, retain the client's exact project title, and format the date as “13 July 2026”. If the same bid requires a French annex, translate the narrative but preserve official acronyms and price figures exactly.

References

• Multilingual language guide
• English-only East African standard
• Proposer profile router

Human-English overlay

Before drafting or reviewing English, load the human-English editorial standard. For proposal sections, draft from the proposal phrase bank and its tone rules (specific over superlative, the client's words in needs and goals, one idea per sentence, reassurance not boasting, forward-looking conclusions, price stated plainly). It governs reader, purpose, genre, grammar, collocation, rhythm, and proof. Preserve local terminology where it is correct; do not equate formal English with inflated or bureaucratic English.

English collocation and lexical-precision overlay

Load english-collocations-and-lexical-precision-2026-09-02.md alongside this standard. It strengthens precise word choice, natural collocations, evaluator-fit register, idiom restraint, calibrated claims, and proof.