Simple sentence structure can substantially reduce ambiguity

What it is

Translation-oriented syntactic simplicity removes unnecessary nesting, dangling modifiers, chains of pronouns, and ambiguous coordination so dependencies are recoverable. Simple does not mean uniformly short or stripped of technical terms; it makes who did what, which phrase modifies which object, and which step a condition governs unambiguous. “Substantially” describes the practical direction for highly ambiguous source copy, not a universal effect size.

Why it happens

Distance between a modifier and its head raises processing load; it creates structural ambiguity only when the sentence also offers multiple plausible attachment sites. Likewise, translators must choose among parses when a pronoun has several candidate referents or a conditional clause has several plausible scopes. Machine translation also commits to one analysis, and a wrong choice can propagate into word order and agreement. Removing unnecessary nesting and repeating a decisive noun can often shrink the parse set. Excessive deletion can do the opposite by removing subjects, objects, or logical connectors.

Where it stops holding

Readability formulas, average sentence length, and clause counts do not independently measure translation difficulty. Legal, medical, and engineering content may require complex structure to preserve scope and conditions; splitting it without explicit links is hazardous. Target languages may also prefer different information organization, so source simplification removes avoidable ambiguity rather than prewriting target order.

Applying it

• Keep one principal proposition per sentence; split dense conditions, exceptions, and consequences while preserving explicit logical links.
• Place modifiers near their referents, replace multiply referential pronouns with nouns, and retain actor and object in high-consequence actions.
• Before translation, ask an uninvolved reviewer to map actor, action, object, and condition scope; rewrite any sentence with two defensible parses.
• Use back translation and multilingual QA on critical messages, comparing proposition roles and condition scope rather than length or grammaticality alone.

Related

• Same group: S1.07.1 Avoid idioms, puns, and culture-bound jokes · S1.07.3 Terminology must first be consistent in the source language · S1.07.4 Avoid embedding text in images
• Adjacent: T1.03 Trading concision against completeness · T1.07 Readability levels and target readers
• Search terms: controlled authoring · syntactic ambiguity · translation-friendly writing