Yesterday a few of us from the office went to a well-known language school in town and spoke for about an hour to a variety of students about the magical joy of working as a translator for our agency. Despite a slightly lower headcount than expected (bloody students! ;), it went well and lots of questions were asked at the end, which is always a sign that interest is being feigned. Err, paid.
When my turn came for ten minutes on ‘You and Your Proofreader’, I was already half stoned on a heady cocktail of prescription medication for this angina (which in less than 24 hours of taking it, is already vastly improving the situation, hooray for medicine!). Still, I managed to get something together in my head and spit it out to the assembled masses, and I’d like to offer a précis of those ramblings to you today. I’ll try not include all the bits that began with ‘errr... so as I was saying... what was I saying?...’.
In the beginning, there are a few different ways of checking a text, and I’m not even going to get into the whole debate about ‘how well can a proofreader proof if he doesn’t understand the SL and doesn’t read the ST note-for-note with the TT?’ I mean rather that proofreading is something one does with the final draft of a book or article for publication, and typically only very infrequent changes need to be made – a comma here, a spelling mistake there. Then you have copy-editing, which is a few steps before proofreading and will involve some editing and re-writing of a text, typically a newspaper piece.
Then we have proofreading for translations which sort of falls between both stools. The better a translation is, the more like proofreading it is. Do you see the logic? So:
Practical things: When you get a proofread translation back with Track Changes on, there will probably be much more red on it than you would think necessary. But it’s important to remember that about 75% of all those red squiggles are fairly meaningless things, like tiny formatting adjustments or language changes. So you shouldn’t panic, but rather check through it calmly and carefully to find the things you need to know.
Working for a translation agency you could either be based at home, or be coming in to the actual office every day. Coming in to the office can be a nice change from sitting at home all day working, and can also give you some insight into what kinds of work you’ll be getting over time. You can also find this out by being friendly with the coordinators and so on, but of course most of the time you’ll get a diverse array of texts and so you should prepare to be flexible. Agency work is good field training, and it’s good to get an idea of how these places operate since even in your freelance work you’ll be dealing with agencies and coordinators a lot.
You won’t always know if your work is being proofread, and I suspect it’s not that common to have a native SL speaker checking it. This is why, of course, one should always strive to be the best and do the best work possible, so that it can stand proudly with or without final checking. One thing to note though is that not all agency coordinators are themselves linguists, and so you should be prepared to answer what may seem to you to be silly, obvious questions about your work. These are not criticisms but rather just the coordinator needing to double check something about the text, to make sure it meets the customer’s requirements.
The other side of that coin is, with the non-linguist agency people, that if they have a proofreader who tells them there are ‘issues’ with your work, they may send the text back to you with a rather curt request to check it again. Now, sometimes they’re just rather graceless people with no idea how to communicate like a human being, but often they’re really only just hyper-busy, living on the edge of multiple converging deadlines and dealing directly with fussy, impatient, know-it-all clients, so do try always to be gracious and a little bit understanding in your dealings with coordinators, as this will pay-off in spades with continued work and increasing trust.
The third side of this rather oddly-shaped piece of pocket change is when you have your own countrymen checking your work. Now, in my experience, this is not always the best thing, because many times I’ve seen it happen that the checker will change something not because it’s wrong or needs fixing or improving somehow, but rather because they would have translated it differently, and so they replace your work with theirs. This gives the non-native coordinator the impression that the checking is taking longer than it should because your work sucks, and when they see all the changes the proofreader made, they think you’re a bad deal and they get nervous. The only thing I can tell you here is, if you’re in a position where you’re proofreading a document that was SL in your own language, do try to stick as closely as possible to the ‘only change it if it’s broken’ methodology. Ego should play no part at any stage of the translation process, even though niestety sometimes it does.
Righto, this is going on somewhat so we’ll cut it here and carry on tomorrow. I hope this is proving as interesting to you as it seemed to prove to our captive second-year students the other day. I assumed then that the smiles at the end were those of satisfaction, although come to think of it, they might have been for my wild, crazy eyes, standing-up hair and slightly unshaven mug. Hmm…
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