MY COMMENTS ON TRANSLATION PROOFREADING
Everyone in the translation industry regards proofreading / editing as a means of ensuring the quality of translations. (For the record, people on online translation forums, like ProZ.com, keep insisting that there is a difference between “proofreading” and “editing”. Proofreading is merely checking for spelling errors and clumsy phrasing and things like that, whereas editing demands a more critical view of the text for its content; it includes things like getting style and terminology right.) And I’m no exception: I make a point of setting aside time to proofread my own work before I send it off. After all, many, MANY things can be labelled as translation errors, and we’ve all heard of the saying “nobody’s perfect”…
When I’m not translating stuff from French or German into English, I’m often proofreading stuff that has been translated into English. Translation agencies offer me proofreading jobs all the time, implying from the outset that they are willing to pay me for them. Consider the “four eyes concept” in the translation industry.
When it comes to the concept of proofreading, if a proofreader is dealing with a bad translation with lots of mistakes in it it’s surely easy to imagine them finding it irksome having to correct them all, and especially if this asks for rewriting whole clauses and such. But I can tell you that, however many mistakes a translated document may have, the thing that really tests a proofreader’s patience is when a translated text that they are looking it is poorly translated in a way that it just leaves the reader awfully confused time and time again.
On the surface, this is a reminder that you have to be properly articulate – at a higher level – to be a translator. The meaning of a sentence can be changed by the smallest of things, such as the spelling of a word, or the inclusion or omission of a certain piece of punctuation e.g. an apostrophe. Ring any bells? And I don’t think you need to be all that articulate to at least begin to understand what I mean by that.
Yet however articulate I may be, I resolutely avoid adopting the kind of approach to my work where one is not really focussed on anything other than doing their bit toward getting something done to the point of “satisfactory” and leaving it at that. You don’t see or consider any kind of need for initiative, being mentally blind to anything that might or could make sense to other people but not you, and simply ignoring that which the work itself or your own role in it may represent within the (possibly alleged) bigger picture. You don’t care for or consider absorbing anything unless specifically told that it’s expected of you. For example, when a person is asked to do a simple household chore that requires little to no real thought to get it accomplished, like emptying the dishwasher or putting out the bin, they could just adopt this attitude as they did it leisurely and chances are that no-one would care any more than they would (or even notice). But, as far as I’m concerned, this is something that definitely should be discouraged when it comes to professional translation work! It’s what I call “sleep-working”, and I believe that if you do any kind of translation work with this attitude, then there’s a significantly increased chance that the one who would proofread it would end up very frustrated when doing it even if they’re an experienced proofreader. To me, even if they had a good knowledge of the language that the document was translated from, with a copy of the original to consult, in addition to a good knowledge of the language of the translation as they went through the translation, it might not solve everything. Also, it’s worth suggesting that, if you sleep-work your way through a translation proofreading task, you might introduce an error into a translated article no later than eradicate existing ones!
But I have very good reasons for claiming that my own proofreading skills are more than good enough for professional translation purposes. There’s this translation agency in Russia I’ve been doing a lot of work for recently (like, at least three jobs a week!) and my regular project manager there has repeatedly given me tasks of proofreading English documents which were translated from languages that I myself cannot speak. I don’t hide that from him, but it never bothers him. But I have a sound knowledge of French and German as well as English, and he has had enough faith me that, with one project, he sent me a French document with a German translation of it, asking me to read through both of them carefully and register any updated changes already present in the French one, in the German one! Even now, he keeps offering me work which I’m happy to accept; but given what I really need to do to satisfy some of the things he asks me for to do for him, like said French-to-German project (and it tends to include compliance with short deadlines), he is probably the sole client that I’ve had to show the most flexibility with to accommodate and meet his demands. He knows this as well I do. Trust me, there’s nothing wrong with it. I recently asked this man to provide a reference. His name is Ivan Kiselev, of the translation agency ABC Translations in Russia http://www.abc-translations.ru/.