A Colleague asked me to re-write a sentence for him in my bestest English. He started out with:

If, during the loading of the front file, the system detects wrong information, the respective document that contains the error is rejected and will not enter into the database.

The best my muddled head could come up with this afternoon was:

If incorrect data is detected in a document during loading of the front file, then the document will be rejected and the data contained in it will not be placed into the database.

Can anyone do better ?

Note: The audience is well-educated people who don’t generally have English as a first langugage

is ‘the front file’ the best description of it?

If you **** it up, it won’t work.

If the system detects wrong information during loading, the respective document that contains the error will be rejected and won’t be entered into the database.

You’ve done it wrong and you smell. Go away!

The front file = a file containing information just published, as opposed to historical data.

Wrecker, I do like brevity, but your version doesn’t really fit in with the effort that is being made across the organisation to make documenting our day-to-day functions as difficult and soul-desrtoying as possible.

If the system detects incorrect data during the loading of the front file, the respective document that contains the data is rejected and shall not be entered into the database.

Documents containing incorrect data will be rejected.

If the system detects incorrect data during the loading of the front file, the respective document that contains the data is rejected and shall not be entered into the database.

I agree with this’un. Send a lot of emails to Europeans and seem to get my point across most of time.

The database will not accept a document if the data within it is incorerect

If errornious data is detected
whilst the front file is loading
you can bet it’ll be rejected
with a sense of foreboding

“respective” is not required in any of those examples. Doesn’t even make sense, “relevant” or “related” would be better, but I don’t think any of them are required. Especially if you’re dealing with people who don’t speak English as their first language.

If the system detects incorrect data during the loading of the front file, the respective document that contains the data is rejected and shall not be entered into the database.

The word order doesn’t change much when you translate it into Spanish, which is probably a good sign.

I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the OP’s version.

Sometimes the system will not work as you expect.
.
.
covers all bases

Thanks for all the suggestions, I tried to get him to use the poem, but he was too much of a coward. 🙁

+1 for the original being fine, apart from “respective” being superfluous.