Adapt to Style Guides

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Note

Style guides are a specific feature of Lara Prosa, an advanced stylistic translation service for high-value content where voice, rhythm, and editorial quality matter as much as accuracy. Contact us to create your style guide →

A well-structured Style Guide allows Lara Prosa to assimilate the linguistic identity of your text, avoiding stylistic leveling and preserving the author's voice.

To allow Lara Prosa to correctly process and apply your writing preferences, organize the style guide according to this standard hierarchy:

Executive Summary

Purpose: Lists the fundamental rules of rhythm and flow. This is the first section that Lara Prosa processes — it must immediately communicate the most critical constraints.

Pace management

Describe how the author alternates short sentences and long sentences, and indicate which connectors are to be avoided. Each rule must be accompanied by an example from the original text that shows the expected behavior.

Manzoni alternates very short sentences with long periods without artificial connectors such as "moreover", "therefore", "in addition". Rhythm comes from variation.

✅ Short sentence — keep intact: "Miseries; but it takes so little to disturb a happy state!"

✅ Long sentence — do not break: "It was like the damp wick of a candle, which at first smokes, spits, crackles, and refuses to cooperate; but in the end it lights."

Use of repetitions

Specify whether the text intentionally uses anaphora or recurring syntactic structures, and explicitly indicate that replacing them with synonyms is a mistake.

✅ The anaphora must be preserved identically in the target language: "I have learned not to get involved in riots: I have learned not to preach in the square: I have learned to look at who I am talking to..."

❌ Do not replace with: "I understood", "I realized", "I discovered" 

Negative space

Indicate whether the text uses pauses and omissions as elements that convey meaning. Specify that these gaps should not be filled with editorial additions.

"Don Abbondio was silent, like someone who has more to think about than to say."

 ❌ Do not add: gestures, sighs, or actions not present in the original (no "nodded", "sighed", "looked away")

Voice & Legacy

Purpose: defines the general expressive profile and the stylistic reference models. This section guides Lara Prosa in choosing the overall register.

Nature of the voice

Specifies whether the prose is oral/performative or non-fiction/impersonal. If the narrator addresses the reader directly, indicate this explicitly: this voice should not be neutralized.

Oral voice speaking to the reader, not non-fiction. The narrator uses direct apostrophes: "you know", "you see", "you can believe".

"Now you know what expectation is like: imaginative, gullible, confident..."
❌ Do not neutralize in the impersonal third person.

Stylistic vectors

Indicate the models to follow in the target language and those to avoid. Providing concrete references (authors, works) is more effective than abstract descriptions of the register.

✅ Use: accessible narrative prose (Calvino, Chekhov, Austen) 
❌ Avoid: baroque or academic registers, excessive subordinate clauses, redundant adjectives

Project Context

Purpose: defines the specific characteristics of the text being worked on. While Voice & Legacy describes the general authorial profile, this section focuses on the specific characteristics of the actual work.

Specific tone

Indicates the dominant tone and its nuances. A poorly calibrated tone can betray the author's intention even when the translation is lexically correct.

Tone: ironic but affectionate. The narrator teases the characters with kindness, not with sarcasm.

"The plague had undertaken to mend all his misdeeds."
→ Irony that is both macabre and tender. Neither too mocking nor too sentimental.

Structure and formats

Identifies the intentional structural asymmetries of the text: digressions, fragmented narratives, metatextual comments. Specifies that these irregularities should not be corrected.

The narrative is non-linear: the narrator digresses, anticipates, and comments on his own manuscript. These asymmetries are intentional.

"The man (says our anonymous narrator: and you already know from experience that he had a somewhat strange taste in similes; but forgive him this too...)"

❌ Do not shorten or restructure into a more "orderly" form.

Sentence-Level Guidance

Purpose: operating instructions for sentence-by-sentence calibration. This is the most prescriptive section: each rule must be mechanically applicable.

Punctuation

Specifies how the author uses punctuation for rhythmic purposes. Indicates when it should be preserved even if the target language would allow alternatives.

Semicolon = short pause; colon = immediate specification.

"When Bortolo heard about it, he ran to see; he negotiated: one could not have hoped for more lucrative deals..."

❌ Do not replace with full stops (breaks the flow) 
❌ Do not replace with commas (speeds up too much) 
✅ Change the punctuation only if grammatically necessary in the target language, not out of stylistic preference.

Conceptual capitalization

Specifies whether the text uses symbolic capitalization for personified abstractions, and whether this use should be replicated or avoided.

Manzoni does not use symbolic capital letters: no "Justice", "Good".

❌ Do not add: "Providence", "Fate", "Evil" with a capital letter unless the original explicitly does so.

Notes and apparatus

Define the policy on glosses. Specify when an addition is acceptable and how it should be integrated.

✅ Acceptable: a line of historical context in a footnote (e.g. "the resident of Venice" → a brief identifying gloss) 
❌ Not acceptable: extended notes that interrupt the reading every three lines 

Below is an example of an optimal style guide structure:

THE AUTHOR'S ORIGINAL STYLE
Manzoni combines an omniscient narrator with an explicit authorial presence: he comments, judges, makes ironic remarks, corrects himself ("to tell the truth", "I don't know what"), calls the reader into question, and alternates between the pathetic and the comical-moral. Long, hypotactic sentences, with asides and gradations; a rhythm driven by anaphora and ternary structures, but always governed by logical clarity. A cultured but not hermetic lexicon, with sudden vivid, proverbial, or colloquial words; frequent contrast between elevated language (religious, civil) and popular speech. Strong descriptive concreteness and socio-historical precision; use of documents and bureaucratic style as parody/denunciation. Christian ethics: charity, providence, personal responsibility; antipathy for the rhetoric of power.

NEW CONTENT STYLE
Chapters XXVI–XXVII accentuate three registers: 1) moral-religious oratory (Federigo) with antithesis, rhetorical questions, imperatives, lexicon of duty/charity; 2) self-commentary by the narrator (“we too… feel repugnance”), with irony and strategic modesty; 3) historical-political and metanarrative digression (war of succession, “to suppose that this work can only be read by the ignorant”), with a mock-pedantic tone and satire of the “reason” for wars. A lot of metalanguage about writing/letters and popular communication: sociolinguistic precision and comedy based on misunderstanding. Alternating pacing: tightly-paced dialog scenes, then broad explanatory frames.

NEW CONTENT SUMMARY FOR CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION
Federigo Borromeo reproaches Don Abbondio for having kept silent about the injustice and deceived Renzo and Lucia; the curate tries to apologize, then softens. Lucia leaves with Donna Prassede; the Unnamed One offers Agnese one hundred scudi. Lucia confesses to her mother the vow of chastity she made during her imprisonment, renouncing Renzo; she decides to send him money and news. Meanwhile, Renzo, hiding in the Bergamo area under a false name, is indirectly involved in political-diplomatic maneuvers; a difficult correspondence mediated by scribes begins.

TRANSLATION GUIDELINES
Voice and tone management: Preserve the tri-layered voice: (a) narrator-as-author, wry and morally alert; (b) elevated ecclesiastical rhetoric; (c) earthy, practical speech (Agnese/Perpetua-like). Do not flatten into a single “neutral” modern narrator. Keep the narrator’s self-interruptions and feigned humility; translate them with idiomatic but slightly formal en-US prose, not slangy.

Register and lexical choices: Maintain purposeful archaism without faux-Elizabethan. Prefer “iniquity,” “charity,” “duty,” “Providence,” “bishop,” “prelate,” “parish priest,” over casual substitutes. Keep key Italian honorifics by functional equivalents (“Your Excellency,” “Your Lordship”) consistently; avoid overusing “sir” where hierarchy is ecclesiastical. Translate “bravi” as “bravos” or “hired ruffians” once, then keep consistent.

Rhythm, syntax, pacing: Retain long Manzonian periods when the logic accumulates (especially Federigo and the war digression), but ensure readability via judicious semicolons, em dashes, and controlled subordination. Do not split every long sentence; split only when English risks losing the argumentative staircase. Preserve anaphora and triads (“amare, figliuolo; amare e pregare”) with parallelism (“to love, my son; to love and to pray”).

Cultural adaptation vs fidelity: Do not domesticate the 1600s Lombard-Spanish context into American analogies. Keep Catholic conceptual frame (vows, Madonna, confession) explicit; no euphemizing. Political offices (resident, governor, captain) should be rendered historically (“Venetian resident/ambassador,” “Governor of Milan,” “Captain of Bergamo”) without modern bureaucratic titles.

Idioms, metaphors, references: When Manzoni uses colloquial metaphors (“tutti m’abbiano a dare addosso,” “la grandine”), choose vivid en-US equivalents with similar register (“everyone’s always on my back,” “now the storm’s coming”) but avoid contemporary slang. Keep authorial similes (“like a damp candlewick…”) close, because they carry tone. Preserve rhetorical questions as questions.

Consistency rules and pitfalls: Keep character names in Italian (Renzo, Lucia, Agnese, Federigo). Keep “Iddio” as “God” (not “the Lord” everywhere); reserve “the Lord” when the Italian implies religious formula. Maintain consistent translation for “premura,” “timore,” “ripugnanza,” “scampo,” “voto.” Avoid making Federigo sound like a modern therapist; his gentleness is pastoral authority, not casual empathy. In the epistolary-metacommentary, preserve the humorous pseudo-sociology; do not over-clarify the joke by adding explanations not in text.