Recently I’ve been taking some copy editing classes with Alice Levine, a Boulder-based editor and trainer whose praises I’ve sung here before. In the translation industry, I think it’s not uncommon that translators who earn a client’s trust are often “promoted” into the role of a translation editor, although very few of us have extensive training in editing in our target language. These classes have brought me to a few realizations about editing and how it applies to translation.
- I should have paid attention in 11th grade journalism class when we studied proofreaders’ marks. Now that I’ve spent six years writing longhand corrections on my own and other translators’ translations, I’m completely sold on the value of proofreaders’ marks. They’re much faster than crossing out and rewriting all of the corrected words, they fit better on a single-spaced page and they make the editing job a little more interesting too!
- Target language editing skills are critical to our work as translators. In my case, I’ve invested a great deal of my professional development time in maintaining and improving my source language skills, but very little time in improving my English language skills, which are critically important to the quality of my work.
- We translators get complacent about our target language skills. It’s rare that I hear into-English translators really get into the nuances of effect versus affect, insure versus ensure, that versus which, and in which cases you need or don’t need serial commas. Again, concepts such as these are critical to the quality of our translations and shouldn’t be ignored.
Another great tip I picked up in Alice’s class is the variety of correspondence courses offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Grad School. It’s an unlikely location (or maybe not!) for affordable (about $355 each) graduate level correspondence courses on topics such as Editing, Proofreading, Project Management and Business Law, but this looks like a true gold mine of topics that relate to the work that most freelance translators do. Many of these are traditional/offline correspondence courses where you complete the work on paper and mail it in to an instructor who gives you feedback before you progress to the next lesson. Has anyone out there taken one of these courses? And if so, what were your impressions?
Thanks for the link — I don’t think I’d ever have thought to look there.
I’ve been living in my source-language country (Japan) for about 9 years now; one of the reasons I started my own blog was because I was worried that my English-writing skills were getting rusty. So I’ll definitely be checking out these classes. Thanks again!
As an in-houser whose job has expanded over the years to include plenty of editing, your post makes perfect sense to me . . . The part about “you improve your own output by paying attention to the output of others” is especially worthwhile. There are an awful lot of translators out there who seem to think that they produce solid gold and the editor’s job it to perform reverse alchemy on it, without ever stopping to think about the signs provided by a good editor that their work might actually be leaden.
I don’t understand why you would stoop to doing line-editing on single-spaced pages, though. Double-space it before you print, if you’re the one wasting the ink, or demand that the translators do that step for you! Big margins and plenty of white between lines are absolute requirements for all texts we deal with.
Finally, the Chicago Manual of Style has a nice section describing proofreaders’ marks. It’s a book that should be on the shelf of just about every translator working in American English IMO.
@Ryan- Yes, I think that it’s the one curse of living in your source language country; I remember when I lived in France, I could never remember if “address” in English had one “d” or two. The USDA courses look great, at least on their website! Let me know if you end up signing up for one.
@Durf- Thanks for all of the reinforcement of the importance of editing; for some reason I think it’s quite overlooked in the industry in the U.S. Nearly everyone edits on the screen and almost no one I’ve worked with has specialized training in target language editing. Thanks also for the recommendation for Chicago Style!
Funny that you mention “that” vs “which”. I actually attended a seminar by Lillian Clementi (FR to EN translator and businesswoman extraordinaire) in which she discussed just that issue at length. Can’t say (unfortunately) that I recall the differences as clearly as she explained it, but those types of issues are being discussed out there somewhere! 🙂