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Giving my client a heads up...
Mar. 20th, 2009 01:09 pmAmong the "lessons learned" during the current assignment is another chorus of "pay attention, dammit!" I did take a look at the translation before agreeing to edit it, but I had to have been just plain sloppy in my assessment, based on how much "essential" editing I've found myself having to do.
Editors of translations are capable of inserting three fundamental types of edits:
(1) Correcting an error. This seems pretty obvious, except that what constitutes an "error" is not all that cut and dried. Obviously, if the source says "turn the power on" and the translation reads "turn the power off," that's an error. Grammar and punctuation errors live here, too. Consider also that all errors are not created equal. Transposing two letters of an author's name in one of several hundred bibliographic references at the end of a 100-page document is not nearly as serious as the same error appearing on the cover page of the document.
(2) Correcting minor errors. Here, too, "minor error" is a difficult concept to nail down. For the nonce, I'll just say it describes things like awkward phrasing, the kind of language that would raise the eyebrow of a reader.
(3) Rewriting the translation. Sometimes, text has been so poorly translated, it must be scrapped entirely and the source retranslated. Otherwise, such excursions merely scratch an itch in the editor's ego.
(Can you tell I just don't want to go back to this editing job?)
Anyway, I just sent a short note to my project manager to summarize a phone conversation we had earlier. The money quote:
Cheers...
Editors of translations are capable of inserting three fundamental types of edits:
(1) Correcting an error. This seems pretty obvious, except that what constitutes an "error" is not all that cut and dried. Obviously, if the source says "turn the power on" and the translation reads "turn the power off," that's an error. Grammar and punctuation errors live here, too. Consider also that all errors are not created equal. Transposing two letters of an author's name in one of several hundred bibliographic references at the end of a 100-page document is not nearly as serious as the same error appearing on the cover page of the document.
(2) Correcting minor errors. Here, too, "minor error" is a difficult concept to nail down. For the nonce, I'll just say it describes things like awkward phrasing, the kind of language that would raise the eyebrow of a reader.
(3) Rewriting the translation. Sometimes, text has been so poorly translated, it must be scrapped entirely and the source retranslated. Otherwise, such excursions merely scratch an itch in the editor's ego.
(Can you tell I just don't want to go back to this editing job?)
Anyway, I just sent a short note to my project manager to summarize a phone conversation we had earlier. The money quote:
Please be informed that my progress with this document has been slow,That kind of says it all.
running to about 500-550 words per hour, due to extensive editing to
correct poor word choices, improper usage, incorrect terminology,
nonstandard punctuation, and awkward sentence structure.
Cheers...
