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The most popular service after Translation is most definitely Translation Editing (or the so-called Post-editing).
It is becoming bigger and bigger part of translator’s regular workload and here’s why…
The comeback
Тranslation Editing was until recently considered a side project, a translation already done by someone else, which you can merely skim trough.
As artificial intelligence advances on many fronts, language services make no exception.
A substantial part of the translation projects is first passed through a machine translation software and then a human editor is assigned.
Two sides of the same coin
For the assigning party this practice sometimes saves time, but always saves money.
The rate of Translation Editing is ranging from 30% to 50% of the translation rate.
On the other end of the project, though, translators often don’t really save time editing, as the quality of the initial translation might also vary widely.
This brings us to the conclusion that it would be faster and more beneficial for the language specialist to translate the text from scratch.
Editing checklist
Given the meticulousness of the editing quality needed, it’s no surprise that many editing projects are eventually turned down (or simply charged as a translation). Here are some of the aspects which need to be followed through during an editing job:
- Unification of the font and text size
- Spell check
- Punctuation
- Adherence to the transliteration rules/spelling of the names included in the text
- Terminology/term base consistency
- Alignment of the style used in the text, according to the field of the text subject
- Vocabulary
- Grammar
Same, same…
Nevertheless, post-editing might be a sweet, easy-going project, given that many documents are re-issued with almost the same content every year, half a year, quarterly or even monthly.
In texts with a predominant 100% match with a previous translation, a specific fee might be negotiated based on the word count of exact matches and unique text.
In such instances, a common CAT (Computer-aided translation / Computer-assisted translation) tool (such as SDL Trados, Matecat, Wordfast, Memsource, etc.) lowers the bridge between the client, the service provider and the editor, letting statistics speak louder than budgeting and establishing transparent common ground for proper project evaluation.
Feel like giving it a try?
