Proofreading is, like so much else in life, a quest for balance: does it read well? Could it read better? What changes can I introduce?

Translators rushing against deadlines must weigh the possible benefit of a full rewrite against definite penalties involved with post-term delivery. But we bear into the battle a handicap that makes the proofreading problem terribly unfair: translators tend heavily toward perfectionism. We like getting things right. Or even perfect. If we only had the time, many of us would polish that menu to a bright sheen, or unify the third and fourth sentences in a financial statement to equal the first in brilliance and focus.

But we cannot. A translator’s history is written in the past nearly-perfect tense, with glorious efforts not quite qualifying for literary excellence and without the time and space to reach perfection.

I propose that a lot of the frustration can be alleviated by a paradigm shift: figure out what proofreading includes, and do only that — even when other, similar activities beckon. Doing this can keep your energy fresh and will result in translations that are better, more readable — and cost you less in time and effort.

Whodunit?

Like any well-run estate, proofreading is best performed by the butler — not the lead character. Our butler is here is someone unobtrusive and service oriented, who can do it well and not involve the leader in most of the details.

There are several very good reasons for finding a butler for this:

• The butler’s eyes are fresh, for this text; he’ll spot things that you’ve seen so often as to have become desensitized to;
• The butler’s effort will leave you more time to generate income by translating fresh texts;
• The butler develops a sense of what is required and can tune his performance to the circumstances;
• The butler gets a clear set of instructions from you, which means you actually think formally about the proofreading;

Of course, not every well-run translation studio has a butler. If you can get into a mutual butlering agreement with a colleague, you’re in luck. Otherwise, find a paid butler — or corral a willing student and train them. Whatever you do, don’t let your parents, children, or spouse proofread: these relationships have too much to gain from nit-picking, fault-finding, and generally dragging Aunt Kaye’s 1954 Scrabble hand into a setting which should be more industrially oriented. With sufficient time you can even be your own butler, although following your own orders politely is a very hard thing to do well.

Proofing as Compared to Reading

Now that you know who’s doing it, you’ll have to give some thought to what actually gets done. The trick is making sure you’ve done your bit and completed your first or second or nearly final draft. Now it’s time to read the text through — and that’s the proofreading. Any rereading you do beforehand is part of the translation process and outside the scope of this article. I’m talking about taking the material you’ve produced and reading it through, start to finish.

This read-through is blessed with a red-pen, physical or virtual. And red pens are best suited to error handling. But what exactly is an error?

This is the question you should keep in mind, while reading. “Is this wrong or is it me?” — and if it is wrong, in your opinion, do not hesitate to correct.

At the proofreading level, an error can be a misspelling (although spell-checkers pretty much rid us of that); a statement misread and misunderstood an error of tone, a sin of omission and similar issues. Your role is not to question grammar unless it is blatantly wrong for the kind of writing being produced.

When you proofread, start by reading the text through — and keep in mind the possibility of leaving the text exactly as it is. It’s not something to agonize over — it’s a project to complete.

Sure, make a note of the things that seem odd without comparing them to the original. Is the strange placement of the word ‘too’ touch too Dutch? Does the French idiom jump out of the page at you? These call out for change. But changing ‘was born in 1935’ to ‘born 1935’ is hardly worth the effort, in most cases.

As proofreader you’re not there to rewrite — just clear-read. The question you want to keep asking is: “Is this an error? Or is it just that I’d use another word?” This is the focus of the exercise.

False Friends and Texts Gone Native

As you go along with that ‘do I have to change it?’ attitude, you’ll find plenty of the kind of thing that really does have to change. Reading for the meaning of the text will clue you in to the strange bits — ‘false friends’, words that sound similar but mean very different things in other languages, or originally sound grammar that has spent a few years too many under the coconuts or up the glaciers.

Some false friends are notorious: pregnant is not embarrassed, and any mistaking of one with the other screams out ‘Spanish!’ to educated readers. Others are more insidious: I recently ran across a mistranslation of Hebrew’s ‘pluma’ which means not ‘feather’ but ‘down’; the meanings are close enough unless you’re importing a product and need to determine the customs duties.

The grammar issue is a thorny one. Language changes constantly, which means that an in-country reader will probably see nuances in either the source or target that anyone outside the country would not. Grammar, more than word usage, is the bastion of the editor.

That said, if you don’t want your translation to sound ‘like a translation’, keep on the alert for the grammar of the source language, repeated in English words. But grammar echoes the translator’s soul — in my experience it is best to keep a very light hand on grammatical eccentricities. Take them out if they’re weird or wrong, if they obstruct the meaning or sound too stiff or too loose. Otherwise, let them stay: when you’re proofreading, your way of saying things is good only if it’s better.

A good touchstone for grammatical issues is a non-native reader. When you have to learn the language through its grammar, you grow very sensitive to even slight deviations. “What does this mean to you?” is a good question for an educated non-native speaker of your target language. Other than the occasional shocking response, you’ll get a good feel for the limits of even an elastic grammatical system.

Pressing ‘Send’ and MEANING it

Once you’ve gotten to the end of the text, and read it through and found it good, stop.

By all means, check the parts you’ve marked as odd, set up a procedure for uncovering omissions. Look it up in the original if it sounds funny. Make notes when you discover new abbreviations or usage. But when you’re finished — flush it out of your mind.

Too many proofreaders call me up the next day, or the next week, with a really great idea for something that’s been out the door, billed, and paid for. Even as an intellectual puzzle, post-facto attention to proofing means you’re not spending time on whatever it is that you’re doing at that moment. Even the best proofreader makes mistakes, as do the best translator and heart-surgeon. And while it is good to feel important, there is a freedom in the knowledge that our efforts are merely a matter of words and ink, not flesh and blood.

[This article was originally published at Multilingual Computing in 2000.]

Twitter is a fascinating service.

Remember being excited about email, the first time you came across it? How it let you communicate quickly with no time lag, even with people all the way across the world?

Remember your first exposure to a mailing list? Mine strongest (although not my first) was Lantra, where professionals in the fields of language and translation met up and talked about the business of translation, computing needs of the multilingual user, words that needed a quick definition, and politics. It was a great bunch of people, and the discussions were enlightening (except when they weren’t, of course.)

Then the list grew too large for conversation and my life got too busy for filtering out the noise, and I quit, somewhat sadly, and rejoined the not-entirely-digital world.

Twitter has much of the same magic. It lets you listen to short bursts of information from a carefully curated list of people. VERY short bursts: you have to keep your comments down to 140 characters or less. It’s a perfect frame for wit, and for shortened links. It allows fascinating discussions, and has evolved conventions for talking to people (start your message @denashunra to talk to me) and including others in the conversation (put @shunradan anywhere in the message to include Daniel), for focusing on an issue (use # before a word to make it searchable – to make it into a clickable link that leads to a search throughout twitter for anyone who used the same term with a # before it.)

It is a mighty nifty system.

One of the things that happens when you use Twitter for a while is that you meet like-minded people, either because someone you know mentions or addresses them or because you run into their twitter feed elsewhere, and they add you to their reading list (a.k.a. they follow you), which tends to expand your Twitter conversations and world, much in the pattern of a system of roots.

One of my dear Twitter friends is Nayem Kabir, who lives in London and tweets sensible, amusing, agreeable, challenging, and otherwise interesting things. I am very, very fond of Nayem, and we correspond outside of Twitter, too – please make a note of this, because I want to be absolutely sure he comes across as the intelligent person that he is.

So, yesterday afternoon I tell Twitter that some idiot contacted me asking that I translate 130,000 words within a week for $0.05 per word. And Nayem gets back to me with the following:

@DenaShunra being asked to do 130k words must be flattering, no? Can’t you increase the price to reflect cost of additional translator?

I responded thusly:

@nayemkabir there are no professionals who would be willing to work at rates that low. Anywhere. Students don’t have the experience needed.

But let’s unpack that:

Nayem’s a business-minded gentleman, and that’s perfectly reasonable. In business, everything needs to be scalable, and many things can be bought.

However, translation is not that kind of work. An average translator will produce 3,000 edited words in every 8-hour day. Producing 130,000 words would take about 44 working days, or two months of work. It seems to me that $6,500 is a bit low for two months of full-time work, but perhaps London prices are lower than… no, scratch that. I know that prices in London are much higher than here. There’s no way a professional with any kind of training and experience would work for that kind of pay, especially since it’s gross – before taxes.

But there’s more.

Remember the deadline for this project? One week? Assuming that I find eight people to share the load with, and they each work at just-slightly-over-normal pace and a rather-seriously-lower-than-normal rate, this is a team that could produce the required number of words within the required deadline.

Only the terminology would be erratic, because each of the eight translators would say things a tiny bit differently.

Have you ever read a thesaurus? Of course you have. Not cover to cover, but enough to know that words can have similar meanings. Assuming we have an agreement, contract, deal, transaction, accord, settlement, or pact. And that the source language talks about a breach, infraction, violation, transgression, or tort (which is very different, but happens to have some similar undertones and therefore uses very similar words in the source language in question).

Now imagine our eight translators, each coming up with a different combination of the violation of the settlement or the breach of the pact. Each translator will use a different set of words, and if the client receives the end product in this state, they will be entirely unable to figure out what the document (which used consistent terminology in the source language) actually meant.

Well, that’s what editors are for, right? So along with the eight translators working full-time for a week (with no time off for weekends or emergencies), let us hire a harried editor, who will review the finished documents at the end of every day, perhaps issuing directives or glossary lists to our translator team. Let us imagine the editor as being in another time zone (say, in Thailand; I know of an excellent translator/editor there.)

The editor’s comments come back every morning, the translators read & internalize them, do their 3,000 words a day, review them, send them off to the editor and – wait a minute.

Those $0.05/word didn’t include editing, did they? But that’s ok, the editor is only doing a part-time job, let’s take the full loot – the whole $6,500 – and divide it into nine pieces. One for each translator, one for the editor. It’s for a week of work, so $722 each should be sufficient, right? (It comes to less than $13 per hour or $40,000 annual gross pay, which means that our freelance translators and editor will be paying social security and healthcare and state and federal taxes over that, and bringing home considerably less than the $722 for the week, basically dropping this team of professionals deep into “you’d make as little if you were pouring coffee” territory).

Wait. Not so fast. I checked out the agency offering this chunk of translation work’s credit standing, in the usual manner. And what do you know? They’re not so hot. I’ll have to take the risk that they will either neglect to pay or pay veeeeery slowly. The translators and editor I hired don’t care if I get paid or not, they want their money, right? So I have to account for that risk, somehow. Say, by taking a bigger share of the initial $6,500 than I give my translators.

Only, oops. Who would be foolish enough to do professional work for low enough rates to make that risk worthwhile?

Nayem has an idea.

@DenaShunra charge $0.085 per word & hire language students from a local university at $0.02 per word. Students would love such one-off work

Oh, really? I respond to him that

@nayemkabir and anyone stupid enough to work at 2 cents a word SURELY can’t translate up to my specs.

Again, let’s unpack that.

The client says that $0.05 is as high as it goes, but let’s run the same project through our whatif machine and see how it comes up with these figures.

Now we have language students trying to be translators. They have little experience and can’t work the full week, on account of going to classes and having finals and such. They also don’t have the experience that professional translators do, and therefore produce 1,500 edited words a day. That means we’ll need 16 of them. I’ll still go with a professional editor, receiving 1/9^th of the budget, but the editing will be more intense, because our avid language students have not necessarily had the experience with contract law that a professional legal translator has. So there will be lots of changes. And double the legitimate vocabulary variants.

So our editor gets $722, each of the 16 students translates 8,125 words and receives $160 (gross. I can’t pay them under the table), and I take $3,218 and all of the risk, and spend a whole week doing nonlinguistic project management, making sure everyone has actually done their share of the work, moved the files to their next step, being in contact with the client (and with projects like this, clients always have additional requests and questions, which someone has to take the time to answer.)

The resulting document will not be as good as I’d like, because the editor (being only human) has missed some nuances, and I haven’t read the whole thing because two of the student/translator people turned out to be duds and did not deliver . When the client calls to ask about them, I’ll have no clue what the item being question was supposed to have meant, because I am not the translator (I’ve been project-managing, remember?) and the translation appears rather bad to me. Oops. The client uses this mishap to refrain from paying me for this translation – which now has to be redone, because the documents have to be filed with a court – and I end up about $3,200 out of pocket, having done no translation (despite being a skilled and experienced translator) and lots of project management (which I do well but unhappily. I really much prefer to translate, which is why I am a translator, rather than a project manager. Well, that and the fact that PMs have to wear nylons to work. But I digress.)

I tell Nayem

@nayemkabir translation is a profession, it takes time to gain the required experience to produce a translation good enough for evidence.

And in my next 140 character message I tell him

@nayemkabir if it’s important enough to pay a lawyer for, you want to get your evidence right – and missed nuance can cost millions.

You’d think he’d say something along the lines of “oh, well, I guess that really is an unreasonable request,” right?

Nope. Here’s a mashed-together series of tweets (that’s the real word for Twitter messages), one after the other:

apologies if my tweet was ignorant (I have a feeling it was). I didn’t mean to cause offense Dena. I know of million (even.. ..billion!) $ firms where “interns” have drafted major pieces of research/work which was then checked & signed off by an expert. Finally, talented students don’t do such work out of stupidity, they do it out of a desire for work experience. Example? Go to go to ANY top tier law firm and ask what their 20yr old Paralegal’s and interns do. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.

See how much you can get into a Twitter conversation?

Nayem’s point is well taken. An intern is certainly likely to be the one who puts the names into standardized forms, motions, and contracts. They won’t be the ones drafting new clauses, though – and if they do draft anything, the lawyer who signs off on their work is the one liable if the error costs a client money. That’s what their errors & omissions insurance is for.

Translation – especially legal translation – is much more like drafting from scratch than like filling out forms, though. It is all about making documents in a one language legible in another. Often, a judge in the U.S. will be trying to interpret agreements made in (for example) Hebrew, in Israel. There will be as many different interpretations as there are parties to the law suit, and the outcome – all millions of dollars worth of outcome – will depend on how the Hebrew contract is understood. In other words, on the translator’s translation of that contract.

With a serious amount of money resting on it, you want the most accurate, careful, considered document that a translator can produce. Not a 16-student hodgepodge. Right?

Btw – I’m merely trying to think “out of the box” but you are ultimately the expert. Perhaps this is one area where the room for error is so small that it can never be “outsourced,” in which case, I’ll keep schtum! :-)

Happily for experts in the world, translation is in no way “the one area where room for error is so small that in can never be outsourced.” When things matter enough, you put in safeguards for them. Like hiring a team of people whose full-time job is to guard the door of a bank. Or like hiring editors, proofreaders, formatters, and reviewers. Or like taking your blood test and MRI results to an expert, for a second opinion, before surgery. Or – if you like your hair cut just so – it is like choosing a hairstylist you know for sure will cut your hair well, rather than heading to the nearest hair-styling school for a cut that may be cheap but chancy. Or going to a fine restaurant rather than an unkempt diner to celebrate a fancy occasion or impress an important contact.

It’s expensive, but it’s worth it. And when you do that hiring, your goal is to find the best, most competent, most effective team of guards, editors, proofreaders, formatters, reviewers, radiologists, or other professionals.

When someone takes a case before a judge – be it a civil case or a criminal one, be the stakes bucket loads of money, liberty, or public safety – the point of due process is to bring before a decider of fact (be it judge or jury) enough evidence to make entirely clear that your side is correct. If you pay for an attorney hundreds of dollars per hour to think up a good strategy, it makes no sense to endanger the implementation of that strategy by someone who is less than thoroughly professional.

As for Nayem, I promised I’d explain my point of view in a blog post, and after a bit of thought he wrote the following:

@DenaShunra I’m not looking forward to your scorn but probably deserve it following my earlier tweets! Do send me the link to your blog post

- which I have done (and hopefully, he’ll comment, below).

No scorn, Nayem. There are far too many people who think that translation can be done by anyone who speaks the language. And indeed, it can! But if you want good translation, if the result really matters, contact a professional. And if you don’t know a professional, contact me – I’ll find a great one for you. One of the professional organizations I belong to, the American Translators Association, has even issued a whole booklet explaining how to get it right.

As for the client wannabe with the 130,000 words, Hebrew to English, within seven days, for 5 cents a word? The job is being advertised again today. They want it within six days now.

I guess it will be a learning experience for everyone.

Theater may have been my father’s first love, and his brilliant singing tenor was tempered with great significance when he’d recite this or that, mostly from memory. Yeah, he sure did bring words alive for me, which was nice for a kid but but handicapped me for the reality of hideous school-based performances which I had to attend as part of the 70’s and early 80’s curriculum of Israeli schools. Schools never did get performances where the thundering truth of the play roars through the actors and audience and brings life to the characters and story and audience and transports everyone in attendance into the world first glimpsed inside the playwright’s mind. Instead, the actors would carefully e-nun-ci-ate every word, with an eye on the adult members of the audience and a condescending lilt in their voices. Overacting was the order of the day in the productions subsidized for schools, intended to slam culture into students. Having seen the real deal (my father’s rendering of The New Colossus – the text on the Statue of Liberty, you know the one, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses longing to breathe free” –  would make a copper stature cry), I was not impressed. But hey, Dad said the actor was really all that good, so I went along.

We walked from home that clear evening, the sky clear and bright without a cloud. It was about twenty minutes from home, and my parents talked about the stuff parents talk about: plans, and how they’d heard about the show, and what they needed to do the next day, and I zoned out, ignoring my surroundings as best I could. Rehovot was not really where I wanted to be.

Now let me tell you about the Wix Auditorium. It seats 583 people, has acoustics that were quite a blessing in the national children’s choirs sing-off I attended between discovering I could sing and finding out that choirs kept getting preached to, and at least in 1983 had rather comfy, red plush seats. We got in, found our seats, somewhere in the left side of the back of the Wix after having greeted the umpteen million people my father knew, and soon enough the lights dimmed and the stage was lit – no curtain, if I remember correctly – and into the spotlight walked a rather nondescript man in street clothes, stepped up to a chair, and walked around the stage, pacing around a piece of parquet and pretending to read from the grave of one William, A bard from Avon, who’d died a few centuries before.

Soon enough McKellen straddled the chair and told us all about Shakespeare, quoting pieces to illustrate points, jumping up on the chair, leaning on a grand piano, running across the stage, stopping only for a short intermission, telling us all about how Juliet was really a petulant teenager and how Midsummer Night’s Dream was merely droll, and ended up with a rousing performance of Macbeth’s response to the news of his wife’s demise. Remember that part of the Scottish play?

Seyton has just told the king that his wife, the queen, was dead. It’s in Act V, Scene V (of the VIII), and – oh, here. Just take it from the bard himself:

SEYTON:

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Properly done, it is a speech to make every hair on your body stand and shiver, and every eye in every audience spring a tear. McKellen did  it properly at the Wix that night, and there was a moment of silence after that “nothing” when the audience was too stunned to realize that the show was over.

Then – in unison – every member of that audience stood up and clapped, applauding the performance which had so stirred us all.

McKellen went back stage, but returned a moment later, and graciously accepted a large bouquet of spring flowers handed to him by a curly-haired young woman.

My vision blurred at that point, because what he did next was to walk over to the exact spot on the stage where he had walked around, at the very beginning of the performance, two hours earlier, and lay that bouquet without a word on the bare parquet, where every one of the 583 people in the room now saw again the grave of William Shakespeare, Bard of Avon. Without a word he bowed to the grave – then to the audience – and exited, stage left.

In the many years of tragedy and joy that have passed since that evening, I have found much sustenance in the energy of that room and that night. The craft of stage and story were exposed to me that night in an indelible, transformative way. My career – translation and teaching and showing and interpreting and peace work –  was sealed at the moment when Sir Ian (as he is now) lay that wreath on what was no longer a bare parquet stage.

The gut-level punch of understanding carried me home in almost a dance, under the bright stars of the clear February night. My parents were just as touched (which I thought, but couldn’t verify for many years – but which my father did eventually confirm a few months ago, in an email.) There was no question in my mind that I would go forth and make the world that much clearer, as McKellen had done for me.

When we got home and turned on the TV news, we found that a live grenade had been thrown at my group in the demonstration, and one of the committed peace activists, Emil Greenzweig, standing in that Jerusalem demonstration, working for peace and justice and demanding accountability for the Sabra and Shatila massacres which Israel’s army had allowed to happen on its watch – had been killed.

OK, it’s not exactly my fifth blog, either.

This is not even my first professional blog, dedicated to the joys and horrors of spending twenty-one years (so far!) as a translator.

But it is special because this is my blog *now*, the object of my current affections.

Have you ever wondered what thoughts come up when you spend your day channeling ideas from one language, into another?

Stick around. It’s more fun than you can possibly imagine.