Spanish Grammar Conventions

Acronyms

Acronyms work slightly differently in Spanish compared to English. In English, once an acronym is defined, you can use the acronym by itself going forward. However, in Spanish, if the acronym originated from English, best practice is to include the full Spanish translation plus the English acronym each time, followed by "por sus siglas en inglés" to indicate it's an English acronym.

English	Spanish
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)	Centros para el Control y la Prevención de Enfermedades (CDC, por sus siglas en inglés)
This guide follows “Federal Plain Language Guidelines” by the Plain Language Action and Information Network (PLAIN).	Esta guía se adhiere a las “Pautas Federales de Lenguaje Simple” de la Red de Información y Acción en Lenguaje Simple (PLAIN, por sus siglas en inglés).

Capitalization

Capitalization rules differ between English and Spanish. In English, most words are capitalized in titles, proper nouns, etc. However, Spanish uses capital letters more sparingly.

In Spanish, capitalization is required in certain cases like:

Capitalization is required for	Examples
The first word of titles and sentences	Manténgase en contacto con su seguro médico
People’s first and last names	Fernanda Williams, Greg Brown
Geographical places like countries, cities, continents, planets	Estados Unidos, California, Brooklyn, Asia, Júpiter
Holidays	Año Nuevo, Navidad
Acronyms	USCIS
Institutions	Ministerio de Diversidad y Género, Museo Nacional de Arte

However, Spanish does not require capital letters in some cases where English does:

Capitalization is not required for	Examples
Languages	español, chino, inglés,
Days of the week and months	lunes, martes, miércoles enero, febrero, marzo
Nationalities	latina/o americana/o, estadounidense
Religions	budismo, catolicismo, judaísmo

Punctuation

Punctuation rules are generally similar between English and Spanish, with some key differences to note.

• Exclamation points: Spanish requires the inverted exclamation point ¡ at the beginning of a sentence, versus only at the end in English.

• Question marks: Spanish requires the inverted question mark ¿ at the beginning of an interrogative sentence, versus only at the end in English.

• Oxford commas: The comma before "and" or "or" in a list is typically not used in Spanish like it is in English (although debatable - search “Oxford comma controversy” for a fun rabbit hole)

• Periods/commas with quotes: In English, punctuation goes inside the quotation marks, while in Spanish it always goes outside the closing quotation mark. e.g.: “El formulario mejoró mucho”, dijo un participante.