Here is a question that needs no dictionary. A Spanish invoice reads "1.500". How much is that? Readers accustomed to English will answer one and a half; in Spain and most of Latin America it means fifteen hundred. Reverse it: "1,500" is fifteen hundred in English, yet in a Spanish context it may mean 1.5. One character, two readings, a thousandfold difference. This is not a question of language proficiency but of two conventions for writing numbers that were never harmonised, colliding on a page which offers no clue as to which one it follows.
The Real Academia Española confirmed the Spanish practice in its updated guidance of 2003: a comma for decimals, a point or a space for thousands, exactly the reverse of English. Its Diccionario panhispánico de dudas likewise recommends the day-month-year order for dates. It is worth looking at the regional formatting data in Unicode CLDR and ICU; one published comparison of default forms across thirteen countries shows the same value 1500.5 written as 1,500.50 in the United Kingdom and the United States, 1.500,50 or 1500,50 in Germany, Spain, Italy and Brazil, grouped with spaces in France, and with an apostrophe in Switzerland. The number stays the same; its appearance changes completely.
One point, two readings
Differences of this kind are easily dismissed as something to "glance at during proofreading", because every word is familiar and the sentence reads smoothly. But numbers in contracts, invoices, test reports and manuals carry legal weight: net content, dosage, tolerance, value, expiry date. One digit out is a different matter altogether. Worse, it rarely raises an error. Read 1.500 as 1.5 and the translation still flows; the client carries on, and the discrepancy only surfaces when the accounts are reconciled.
This is why an experienced translator, faced with a foreign-language table full of figures, does not begin by reading the sentences. The first question is which notational convention the document follows. The clues usually sit elsewhere on the page: is there a date with a day greater than twelve; do both separators appear in the amount column; is a currency named beside the figure; does the header follow an English or a local template? If none of these helps, do not guess; ask the person who wrote it. That is not excessive caution. These characters carry no explanation within themselves, and context cannot supply one. Behind the certificate of origin issued in half a day in our industry piece sits a whole packet of papers, and what goes wrong is seldom a difficult word but almost always a number that looked as though it needed no translation at all.
To work out what 03/04 means, find another date in the same file
Dates are the same trap in another guise. Most of the world puts the day first, so 03/04/2026 means 3 April; the United States and a few others put the month first, so the same string means 4 March. The characters give no hint, and each reader assumes the other is being difficult. There is a pleasantly detective-like routine: look through the same document for a date whose day exceeds twelve, such as 25/03, which has only one possible reading and reveals the convention used throughout the file. If there is none, ask a direct question or spell the month out in words.
Is there a form nobody misreads? Yes: the ISO 8601 year-month-day format with four-digit years and zero padding, for example 2026-04-03, where the opening group can only be a year and the ambiguity disappears on the spot. It is the least troublesome format for exchanging dates. The RAE's Ortografía de la lengua española also advises spelling dates out in words for important documents, for the same reason. What a translator can usually do is not choose the format on the client's behalf, but leave one line at delivery: "the source reads 03/04; I have taken it as day/month/year on the evidence of 25/03 on the same page". One extra line, one fewer argument.
Chinese has its own share of holes
Do not imagine the risk runs only from foreign languages into Chinese. The Chinese enumeration comma has no equivalent in English; force a list of parallel items into ordinary commas and the hierarchy collapses. Book-title marks, parenthetical explanations and figures counted in tens of thousands or hundreds of millions all need their scale recalculated in English. Vague expressions such as "a few days", "thereabouts" or "more or less" cannot simply keep their tone in a document with acceptance or liability clauses. One more frequently missed detail: figures extracted from a scanned table may lose accents, hyphens or decimal marks during recognition, or have them renamed. Mark anything uncertain and ask; never complete it from a feel for the language.
At the multilingual Chinese-to-foreign translation seminar held by the Translators Association of China in Beijing on 6 November 2026, one speaker observed that "no terminological detail is too small, and the difficulty of translating Chinese outward lies not in words but in concepts". The remark holds for figures too: a decimal point is not ornament but part of the concept, and when the notation changes the concept changes with it. The association's consultation mechanism for Chinese-to-foreign translation, built up since 1991 and now covering nine languages alongside a multilingual terminology retrieval platform, is the same sort of dull work: settle the designation first, then discuss style. (Seminar details are taken from the association's website on 9 November 2026 and a China.com.cn report of 10 November.)
The dull routine really comes down to three steps
First, settle the convention before drafting: which decimal mark, which date order, which units this file uses, written into the batch glossary and shared by every document. Second, verify figures and reference numbers field by field, not by reading for fluency but by ticking them off against the original; highlight any scan that cannot be read and ask about it in one go. Third, wherever ambiguity remains, leave a note at delivery explaining the basis of the judgement rather than hiding a guess inside elegant prose. None of the three is new or glamorous, but all of them are easier than sending a correction later.
In the end a comma will not explain itself. The more formal the document, the more it needs somebody willing to pause for half a second over the question of whether that point is a decimal or a thousands separator. In the batch of twenty or thirty thousand characters of shipping papers described in our company piece, the first term locked was the product name and the second was the convention for units and figures. It does not sound like much fun, yet when the accounts are finally reconciled, the amusing story usually concerns the person who did not take that half second.