Editing a Translated Document
Editing a Translated Document in local businesses and organizations are realizing that they need to translate documents into English to expand their worldwide reach as the English language becomes more and more significant as the developing “lingua franca.”
When translation is added to the situation, the issue gets much more complex.
So, how do you edit a document that has been translated from another language into English? What considerations should be taken while working on a document like this? These are the kinds of questions we’ll be looking into in today’s article.
When does the translation start happening?
In its native language, a document should go through a round of editing. This phase of editing and proofreading should take place before the translation to ensure that the original content is free of errors and inaccuracies.
What is the process of translation?
Any document translation has a two-pronged approach. You have the option of hiring a professional translator or using translation software.
A software translator can provide quick results, but it may not account for local or nuanced context, whereas a human translator can be more meticulous about the translation itself, but it comes at the cost of a longer turnaround time.
Using these methods combined might result in a quick and cost-effective solution. That being said, machine translators are improving their ability to recognize context and can now provide a readable translation in less time.
Post-editing the translated document
Post-editing is the process of making a machine-translated document more readable and accurate in the translated language. This is frequently dependent on the quality of the source text, the translator’s accuracy, and the intended audience for the translation.
For each document, we use three rounds of editing at TrueEditors:
- Technical and syntactical mistakes are checked during proofreading.
- Copy-editing for coherence and clarity
- An extensive round of editing is performed to improve general readability and clarity.
The same parameters are used to make the content effective and accurate, depending on the quality of the translated documents.
If the text’s quality is already good, the editor can just work on grammar and lexical coherence to make it seem like it was written by a native English speaker. If the document’s core ideas and crux already translate effectively, no more steps are required.
However, if the translated material does not properly convey its core ideas in English, extra steps must be taken to discover equivalent expressions, idioms, and ideas in the original language.
-Isabell S.
