ARE TRANSLATORS DOOMED TO BE EDITORS?
By Carlos de Paula In the early part of my career as a translator I did quite a bit of proofreading. Most of the time I was told to stick to spelling, but I faced, not seldom, poorly written sentences, grammatical mistakes, and often ended up editing the text, after getting clearance from the client which were usually translation agencies. A few were so terrible they became rewrites. Now the practice of submitting translations to a proofreader or editor mostly disappeared from the industry, even though agency clients are often told text is edited. Translations truly edited by a competent human editor were costly, so “edit” normally consisted of the document being looked over by a project manager that did not speak the language. This meant quality declined, even though word processing software spellcheckers improved (they still have flaws, including changing what should not be changed), as prices dropped. That explains the ambiguous, horrible, dry and downright incorr...