This is a guest post by Karen Tkaczyk, a fellow French to English freelance translator. Karen is a specialized scientific translator, and over the years she has also built up expertise in editing English articles written by non-native speakers. Since this is something many of my students and readers ask me about, I asked Karen to tell us more about this. You can follow her on Twitter (@ChemXlator) or Facebook
One Translator’s Sideline: Editing Non-Native English Scientific Writing
“The manuscript is poorly written and has too many grammatical and syntax errors. The results are promising, but the paper needs thorough revision to make it suitable for publication in The Journal of Astounding Scientific Developments.” Enter the native English-speaking editor.
Editing texts written in English for publication by scientists who have another language as their mother tongue is a relatively common sideline for freelance translators. The measure of success is the article being published after we have worked on it. Even better, the author sends subsequent manuscripts before submission to avoid the painful step of criticism or rejection. We become a trusted partner.
Editing agencies and scientific publishing houses that offer editing services also feature prominently in this market, but I’ve largely stuck to the more lucrative private clients. Another source of much work is graduate students who need editors for long theses but really can’t afford them. I suspect that could be a great stepping stone into this niche, if you want experience, but that it wouldn’t pay the bills.
So in my experience, an academic scientist is writing in English, which is not their native language. As well as journal articles, they send grant proposals, résumés, and accompanying documents. All of that is going through multiple drafts in the run-up to submission deadlines.
This work is a natural fit for me because I have training in a hard science and translate scientific texts as the bulk of my practice. I work mainly with chemistry and texts related to the chemical industry. I have received non-native editing work on and off throughout the 12 years I’ve been a freelance translator. The work has come to me from my ProZ.com profile , from professors I’ve met at chemistry networking events, and from word-of-mouth from translation colleagues who live in France and give my name to academics there. In 2016 non-native editing made up a little over 10% of my billable income. I have never actively marketed myself for this work – it really is something that has just come my way.
What sets this work apart from bilingual editing or from editing texts written by native speakers?
Obviously there are some parallels with other editing work, such as correcting typos and inconsistencies, but it diverges due to stronger source language interference. For instance, these texts may include homonym errors. On the other hand, you can nearly always assume that the technical terminology will be flawless. You might have to adjust hyphenation but you are unlikely to be spending any time researching technical concepts. Another factor is that you might not be familiar with the author’s native language, so you might not read between the lines the way you can when you know the “other” language.
One other thing that sets this apart from translation work is that you’re pretty consistently interacting with the authors. Of course that may be the case in normal translation or editing work but I find that even with my direct clients I am usually working with a contact in the same company rather than the author directly. Here the academic is asking me to quote, sending the files, sending me updated files because they added a paragraph, asking what I think of the article, resending it at 3 a.m, and then submitting it to the journal.
Pricing
The typical market pricing method is per hour, by volume, often assuming 1,000 words per hour. I’ve seen agencies offer per word rates too. Having gained experience and developed an efficient process, I work quickly, so a per hour rate penalizes me. I prefer to quote a flat fee now, and customers never quibble. They don’t need to know how long we spent on it. They need to value what we achieve. When you quote, do remember to include time for back and forth and redrafts, especially until you get to know your customer.
To estimate how long the job will take, we have to agree on degrees of editing. These categories work for me:
• Copy editing (formatting, grammar, punctuation)
• Language editing (style, semantics)
• Substantive editing (flow/content improvements)
• Developmental edits and ghost writing
I always do the first two of these, and have never done the fourth. I make substantive edits for some of my customers.
The occasional need to justify changes, AKA buttering up the client
You have to be willing to invest in relationships to do this sort of work successfully. Once you know your customer, normal amounts of tact work, but at the beginning, I find being gentle and complimentary useful. Massage these authors’ egos a little. Diplomacy is especially useful if you are ripping apart their logic or filling the margins chock-full with edits. So I might sandwich the edits with a few compliments where I can come up with them.
• “I particularly enjoyed the conclusion. I thought it summarized your results very well.”
• “What exciting results. I hope you agree that the abstract conveys your main point more effectively now.”
Sometimes people will love you and graciously take your advice. But you also need to be prepared for the occasional defensive response. So you need to know your stuff, and have ammunition for justifying changes. For me that’s as simple as referring to my preferred style guide and a few straightforward references about scientific writing usage, when I am challenged. Another typical response is insisting that you revert an edited term to use something that reads as non-native, or a calque of some sort (Often “Eurospeak” jargon). I give them my opinion, in writing, so that I can point out that they ignored my advice if the article comes back rejected, and then they decide.
Other value that I can add includes occasional comments for suggested obvious improvements that are not within the scope of the job. Mentioning that “This reference is not listed in the Bibliography” can be a plus.
I enjoy editing as part of my translation practice. It adds variety and helps me think about target-language writing more “purely” than when I translate and might be affected by a source text, so I think it builds up my skills. Once in a while, the authors even credit me in the acknowledgements, so my name makes it into The Journal of Astounding Scientific Developments, or this week’s equivalent: that’s my small reward.
Thanks for sharing, Karen and Corinne.
Just curious, what might your ‘preferred style guide’ be?
We’ll see what Karen’s is: I generally use Chicago unless the client has an in-house style guide (World Health Organization, etc.) or prefers something else.
Hi Paul,
For my work it’s most often The ACS Style Guide. (That’s the American Chemical Society.) http://pubs.acs.org/series/styleguide
I’m a bit of style guide geek though, so I have loads bookmarked and on my shelves. Light bedtime reading. 🙂
Very interesting article.
This part was very relevant for us, as we do a lot of 3rd party review and, you have to have rules and boundaries when doing it:
“Sometimes people will love you and graciously take your advice. But you also need to be prepared for the occasional defensive response. So you need to know your stuff, and have ammunition for justifying changes”
Knowin the stuff and quoting the right books (rules et al) saved us a lot of Time and back-and-forward.
Cheerioh
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the post!
I live and work in Taipei, Taiwan (I’m an American expat & retired Spanish-English court interpreter from Texas, now a prof at universities & soon a part-time high school Spanish teacher). My Mandarin Chinese is conversational & I don’t read it very well.
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I’ve done a decent amount of editing for Taiwanese + some for Koreans; some are friends & I’m simply doing them a favor and some gigs are for cash. When I worked in the military academy system, I edited as unpaid slave labor for the entire academy + its adjoining hospital (our academy trains military medical professionals, not combat officers). I guess Abe Lincoln never made it over to Asia! “We have an American prof who will do any and all medical/professional journal articles and everything else you want to throw at him for free & he’ll even eat up his free time so that you can be published and so that he can have no free time to write and advance his own career + no social life, too. Etc.” I learned to hate this work, so I’m now a bit reluctant to advertise this service & I only do it via word-of-mouth referrals (word-of-email? Is that a word?)
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What is tough to deal with is when the writer insists on first writing the paper in written Chinese and THEN translating it into English and sending me a paper that’s basically Mandarin Chinese with English words. Some of it I can decipher, and the rest is “HUH?” So, were I to advertise editing services, I would include a strongly-worded DON’T SEND ME A TRANSLATION! notice on the website so as to save myself headaches. My first suggestion to any colleagues out there who decide to tackle this type of work.
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Also: some of the MDs who I worked with would want to come to my office and sit with me and edit together. I had to put my foot down and say “NO NO NO NO NO and The Theological Place of Eternal Punishment, NO!” I work better when I can correct with Word Tracking & then we can discuss a few onesies & twosies items f2f after I finish. Again, this is a Put The Foot Down Firmly Issue: “Doctor, we can do it your way, which is immensely slow and inefficient, or we can do it my way, which is immensely fast and efficient. Your call.” So, this is, again, the voice of (bitter) (repeated) experience with a suggestion to colleagues.
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Pricing: I’ve struggled with this. I’ve finally more-or-less settled on an hourly rate, a bit higher the Ministry of Education rate for Assistant Professors in the classroom. This is to allow me to let clients whose English is good save a few $ & to get my $’s worth from the others. I’ve mostly worked in academia with my tiny editing sideline: the military/medical academy, profs and grad students from universities where I work (or their referrals), that sort of thing. What I’ve found is that there’s a spectrum which ranges from something like US-educated Ph.D.s who simply need some tweaks and then they are–as we used to say in my US Army days, G2G, good to go–to not-so-great English speakers who evidently translated into English. One paper is no biggie–fast turnaround; the other is Excedrin Headache # 12 (dating myself here!). Apologies to one and all for the obscure and prehistoric American cultural reference! 🙂
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In the words of my esteemed fellow US Army Infantry soldier, Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOImF3Idis
Dan V
Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.americanolderbrother.com
Thanks, Dan! Really interesting observations there!
Hmmm…I’ve been doing this on an occasional basis for my Indian friends, as I live in a town in India with a large, western-funded institute for the study of Asian cultures. The problem here, of course, is that most Indian academics feel that they write English quite well, and trying to convince them that their syntax has a decidedly… Dickensian(?) flavor can be an uphill battle. It never occurred to me to charge for this kind of thing!
Dickensian! Love it! Indian English is definitely its own thing…I say you start charging!
Great article Corinne and Karen. I’ve been doing this sort of work for most of my translating career. At first I hated it. Working in house for a multinational, the texts were dull and technical, in fields that were frankly beyond me (electronics), and the English was impenetrable. After leaving that job I avoided it for years until I began to get offers in fields I know and enjoy, often a mix of translation and editing. Perfect! Non-native EN, certainly among DE and NL speakers, is much better these days. Always working for an hourly rate and quoting a maximum in advance as clients like the certainty.
I joined the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (in UK) to formalise these skills, and find that a software called PerfectIt helps to catch inconsistencies and polish my edits (comes with preset and customisable style guides, cost reasonable).
Thanks, Sue! Lots of great information there. I’ve also wondered about PerfectIt, and your message convinced me that I need to try it. Thanks for your comment.
Hi Sue.
Impenetrable is a great word to describe a lot of what we have to edit. Experience makes turning that into clear, concise writing much easier.
I have PerfectIt and also Antidote (very similar but for French, so I use it for checking emails to customers, largely). Yes, they can be very useful once you learn to ignore all the false positive results or tailor the settings to your liking.
I’ve also taken editing courses. The Society for Technical Communication has several good online courses.
Thanks, Corinne and Karen —
I, too, have a small, but steady group of academics who use me for this service. One thing that did not come up in the discussion of what to charge is revisions after the paper is still rejected, specifically if it is sent back for fixes (in other words, not a full rejection). My latest author had that happen, and he made the fixes, then sent it past me, to be sure that he had not injected anything wrong. (Always working in English, Dan; I have my profs trained!). I usually charge a minimum for each job, but when I have seen the article already, I don’t. I also use an hourly rate for this. The goodwill is worth it. It makes us feel like we are friends on a team getting the research published.
Thanks, Jonathan
Thanks, Jonathan! Good to know about that possible outcome, with the article being returned but not rejected. I guess it is a dilemma over whether to charge for those kinds of tweaks or not?
For me that depends on the extent of the changes and how good a customer they are. My original quote includes time for follow-up so it would have to be pretty substantial changes for me to charge again later.
Good point, Jonathan. I don’t know about other academic disciplines, but in the sciences, an ‘accepted’ manuscript is almost always ‘accepted with revisions,’ in other words, ‘we will print this if you fix or defend the following X things that your peer reviewers questioned.’ ‘Revisions’ could be as simple as reworking a table or as big as running an additional experiment; in any case, additional writing is usually involved, which would naturally need linguistic review before resubmission to the publisher.
Karen, how do you address this eventuality? Is it floating somewhere in your flat rate, or do you go with an hourly ad-on like Jonathan?
HI Paul, I sort of answered this above but maybe you didn’t see it or they were approved at the same time.
For me extra charges depend on the extent of the changes and how good a customer they are. My original quote includes time for follow-up so it would have to be pretty substantial changes for me to charge again later.
I do agree that ‘accepted pending these revisions’ is very common, but very few of my customers come back to me after the fact.
I have revised a fair number of academic articles written by Spanish archaeologists in English, and the amount of work involved can vary enormously, so I charge by the hour. Naturally, clients want to have some idea of what they’ll have to pay, so I base my estimate on how long it takes me to revise a paragraph or so of their text. I find it’s better to take a piece from the middle, as the text often starts off well enough but sometimes deteriorates as the deadline approaches.
Thank you! That’s such an interesting observation about taking your sample from the middle; great advice.
Yes, absolutely. A random chunk in the middle of the discussion section is more likely to be less well thought out than the abstract or intro or conclusion. I find that methods and results sections are usually well written though, so I wouldn’t use those. Those are often somewhat formulaic and repetitive for papers in a given field, so less often “new” writing.
Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I’m thinking about this line of work as a way to make some extra cash during retirement. (I’m an expat from the US living in the Netherlands, but also an Italian citizen. I’ve done some of this for free for Italian friends.)
I understand the differences in pricing structures, but how do you determine the rate itself? I wouldn’t have any idea what the market will bear in Holland (but let’s just say people are a bit “frugal” here. 🙂
Hi. I’d look at it the other way round and ask how much your time is worth. I know what I want to earn per hour/day/week and I calculate my prices based on that. Markets are usually broad enough to bear a wide range. Students certainly tend to be frugal with their long theses. Professors who have a reputation to protect and whose departments have an editing budget are not so frugal.