subject: Good & Bad Proofreaders [print this page] Your translation often needs to be checked to ensure its good quality. A person who checks a translation done by someone else can be called a reviewer, an editor, a proofreader or simply a checker.
A good proofreader has a cooperative attitude towards the translator whose work he is handling.
A good proofreader has a cooperative attitude towards the translator whose work he is handling. He is aware that the purpose of checking is to enhance the quality of the translation, and thus his role of the proofreader is like a concerned colleague who can help identify the translator's weak points and the errors he may have made. In contrast, bad proofreaders tend to have a condescending attitude. Many inexperienced proofreaders assume an air of superiority in the process of proofreading. They falsely believe that they have more experience than the translator and are granted the authority to criticize a translation, or to downgrade the translator. In reality, it is true that some proofreaders are more experienced than the translator, but this is not always the case. Many translation companies often conduct peer reviewing, which means the person who is hired to review or edit a translation is not necessarily more experienced or professionally better than the translator.
The job of a proofreader is to correct a translation, but good proofreaders and bad proofreaders have different approaches to doing it. Except spelling or typo issues that require immediate changes, a good proofreader will hesitate to change anything until he is sure that the change will serve a purpose. A bad proofreader usually hurries to change anything that he thinks does not match his own stylistic preference. Many bad proofreaders even tend to rewrite everything in their own words, falsely believing the more changes they make, the more competence they can show, at least, to a project manager. While a good proofreader tends to focus on errors that can obfuscate the clarity of meaning or result in misunderstanding of a text, a bad proofreader often concentrates on the minor details. Needless to say, a good proofreader often reviews all the changes he makes before submitting the edited work to the client. A bad proofreader does not review changes nor does this in a careless way.
Good proofreaders usually use the "track changes" function and insert comments which explain why a certain change is needed. The comments they give should make sense and be useful to translator and client. Many good proofreaders are so tactful that they use questions in their comments rather than giving an order.
When sending back track changes files, good proofreaders often write a short note to the project manager, which gives an overall evaluation of the translation they just worked on. Except for the cases where the translation is too poor, a good proofreader does not forget to praise the translator for the good aspects. A good proofreader would also summarize the changes suggested, and give a short explanation why these changes need to be made.
What happens when a translator gets back his translation which is full of the red corrections which he believes are unfair and wrong? As a matter of fact, feelings of anger will ensue. But a professional translator needs to keep calm. He needs to review the translation and the changes carefully and get back to the project manager with an email explaining in details why the proofreader's changes are not acceptable. Since the project manager often does not know the target language the translator is translating into, examples of target texts, if given, should come with English equivalents possibly in brackets.
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