Editing, Proofreading, Quality Assurance
Red-penciling before green-lighting
For your German content that needs some polishing, I offer different levels of editing and quality assurance. The scope is determined by your text’s purpose and target audience. Typical steps may include: spelling and grammar checks, improving the readability and style of your draft, some shortening or optimization of flow and structure, a thorough comparison of source and target versions, fact-checking, and a final round of proofreading before your document gets printed or your website goes live.
In some scenarios, using machines to pre-translate your content may be beneficial. But such a workflow requires careful checks and corrections to make sure the translations really serve your needs. This is a separate service, and you’ll find all relevant details on my MTPE page.
Overview
- What?
- Various types of corrections
- Independent review of translations
- Validation of layout and formatting
- Checking facts and consistency
- How?
- In digital or printed document formats
- With or without “Track Changes” mode
- Always in line with client-specific style guides
- Use of LQA tools such as Xbench as needed
Editing or proofreading?
Have you ever needed someone to polish your content but felt confused by all the terms swirling around online? What’s the difference between “editing” and “proofreading”, and why do some people talk about “line editing” or “copy editing”? And what is “revising” all about? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered!
Let’s start with revising because that’s normally the first step after writing your initial draft. You want to make sure you have a solid structure, your ideas get conveyed clearly, and your sequence of arguments is convincing. That is to say, when revising your text, your focus should be on its content, not on its form. (Having said that, people may sometimes use “revising” in the more general sense of “going over a text again to improve it.” If in doubt, ask for clarification!)
Now we move on to editing and its different subcategories. To keep it simple, editing refers to transforming your text into a piece of writing your audience will enjoy and want to read. You may need help with different aspects. If you’re not sure where you’re going with your draft (especially when writing fiction), consider getting a developmental edit. If you’re at war with language or often struggle to find the right words, you need a line edit that will make your writing clearer and more engaging. If all that needs checking and fixing is your grammar, spelling, punctuation, adherence to a given style guide (if applicable), and correct use of facts and brand names, a copy edit should do.
Last but not least, there’s proofreading. The term goes back to the traditional printing process when a so-called galley proof had to be checked for formatting or spelling errors (introduced by the typesetter) before letting the printing press do its job. In a modern context, proofreading usually means checking the text for any objective language and formatting errors (such as typos, incorrect punctuation, inconsistent style of headings or captions, and so on). A proofreader typically does not check your tone of voice, your facts or your train of thought.
Naturally, there’s some overlap between these different tasks, so make sure you know what you need and what your chosen collaborator is offering.
Language is subjective, but we can quasi-objectively assess certain aspects of it. Assume you have two documents of the same length, let’s say 1,500 words. One of them has a whopping 14 typos, the other only 2 – clearly, there’s a winner and a loser here. However, some errors may be more severe. For example, if a translation is free of grammar and spelling errors but gets numerous technical terms wrong, it’s still useless!
This is where evaluation frameworks like the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) come into play. They define specific error categories and their weights in order to allow assessing and comparing the quality of different texts or translations. If you’re using such a QA system in your team or company, I’ll be happy to follow your preferences and fill in the respective scorecards.
Fact-checking in action
Nowadays, anybody can trigger the automatic creation and dissemination of any type of content with the click of a button – welcome to the age of AI slop! While obvious nonsense such as the Google-approved glue pizza is easy to spot, other types of false claims and misinformation require more scrutiny. This is why my fact-checking services help you identify problematic and misleading statements in your texts that could harm your reputation.
A while ago, I worked as a member of a QA team that had been hired to review and fact-check a large collection of career guide articles for a well-known job website. In addition to our team, multiple other agencies, copywriters, and project managers were involved. Most of us had no direct contact with the end client and were given partially outdated and contradictory style guides and instructions. Not a good sign!
The career guide targeted the end client’s German audience, so color me surprised when I came across a section saying (in German): “If you want to become an orthodontist, you first need to complete a 5-year bachelor’s degree in dentistry.” The thing is, in Germany you have to pass a state exam in order to get your license to practice dentistry, and a simple bachelor’s degree won’t suffice. Plus, the default length of a bachelor’s program would be 3 to 4 years, not 5 years.
The next excerpt from a different article is a bit trickier: “Expect a law degree to take 9 semesters. For admission you need to have a university entrance qualification and a specific minimum grade point average (numerus clausus).” Here, the devil is in the details. The standard duration of law degree programs in Germany is now 10 semesters. It used to be 9, and you still find many outdated pages online – apparently, the copywriter had only done cursory research. Furthermore, the text’s wording implied that GPA and numerus clausus are synonyms. But they are not. A numerus clausus is a method for limiting the number of students admitted to certain study programs. The GPA is just one of various possible criteria.
This may seem like nitpicking but remember: The client wants to be seen as a trustworthy source for people seeking career advice. If their website can’t even get the basics right, how likely would you be to pay for some of their premium services?
Payment and Terms
For editing, QA, and similar services, my standard rate is €50/hour. The necessary effort for turning your texts into publication-ready content will depend on the scope of your project and the specific steps to be performed. To give you at least some pointers: When proofreading a text that was written with care, a feasible throughput is about 2,000 words per hour. If style and readability need to be optimized as well, about 1,500 words per hour are more realistic.
Payments can be made via SEPA credit transfer (for clients in Germany/Europe) or via PayPal (for non-European clients). As usual, my standard terms are 14 days, and my Terms & Conditions apply.
A short editing sample (German)
Given my native language, I usually only provide editing and proofreading services for texts in German, and the following editing sample is in German as well. It is aimed at people with other native languages who wouldn’t get much value out of a mere before-after comparison of an edited German text. If you do speak German yourself, I recommend you switch to the German version of this page and check out the more detailed annotated sample illustrating my style.
The excerpt below is taken from a Pegasystems e-book about IT strategies in various government agencies. A language service provider hired me to review another translator’s work, but it turned out the “translator” had simply run the whole text through DeepL and applied some superficial edits before delivery. The agency had failed to assess his qualifications in advance, and the end client kept complaining about the German translations being too stiff and literal.
I wish I could tell you this was a rare exception, but unfortunately stuff like this is pretty common when agencies serve as intermediaries that only hire the cheapest and fastest freelancers. But in this case, it backfired because the poorly edited DeepL translation required so many changes that it was essentially a new translation from scratch – the agency’s payment to the other translator was money down the drain!
English source text:
Welcome to the twelfth edition of Governments Building for Change, a collection of government client case studies showcasing the power of workflow automation and AI powered decisioning in overcoming challenges and unlocking new opportunities. As we navigate the complex and ever-evolving landscape of public administration, the transformation that leaders have highlighted here show the potential of technology to drive positive change and deliver efficient, citizen-centric services.
Challenges and issues: English is a fairly “lightweight” language. You can stuff a sentence with nouns, participles, and subordinate clauses without your readers instantly falling asleep. German? Not so much. Our words tend to be longer, our nouns feel heavier, and nested sentences run on and on. Therefore, when translating from English into German you often have to re-order things or break up a sentence to preserve the smoothness of the source. Machine translations rarely do this. They might get the grammar and vocabulary right, but the output will feel clunky and boring.
This is a key problem with the original translator’s version. The underlined part below is a seemingly endless string of nouns and just tedious to read. To make matters worse, the translation is too literal and passive – it makes you want to delete the e-book before you’ve even reached page 2!
Bad translation:
Willkommen zur zwölften Ausgabe von Governments Building for Change, einer Reihe verschiedener Case Studies von Regierungsbehörden, die die Möglichkeiten der Workflow-Automatisierung und der KI-gestützten Entscheidungsfindung bei der Bewältigung von Herausforderungen und der Erschließung neuer Chancen aufzeigen. Angesichts der komplexen und sich ständig weiterentwickelnden Verwaltungslandschaft verdeutlichen die hier vorgestellten Veränderungen das Potenzial der Technologie, einen positiven Wandel voranzutreiben und effiziente, bürgernahe Dienstleistungen zu schaffen.
In my edited version, I broke up the first sentence and replaced the clunky/passive noun forms (“Bewältigung” and “Erschließung”) with their more active verbs (“bewältigen” and “erschließen”). I also replaced a needlessly opaque anglicism (“Fallstudien” instead of “Case Studies”) and got rid of some wordings that instantly identified this text as a translation (“Willkommen zur zwölften Ausgabe…” and “Verwaltungslandschaft”). The result is a version that’s easier to read, doesn’t sound like a translation, and made the client happy as well.
Edited translation:
Die vorliegende zwölfte Ausgabe von „Governments Building for Change“ enthält auch diesmal wieder eine Reihe von Fallstudien zu innovativen Strategien in Behörden und Regierungsstellen. Die Beispiele zeigen, wie sich mithilfe von Workflow-Automatisierung und KI-gestützter Entscheidungsfindung ganz unterschiedliche Probleme bewältigen und neue Chancen erschließen lassen. Denn das Verwaltungswesen wird immer komplexer und entwickelt sich ständig weiter. Umso wichtiger ist es, Technologien gezielt einzusetzen, um einen positiven Wandel voranzutreiben und effiziente, bürgernahe Dienstleistungen bereitzustellen.
Frequent Questions
Will there be a free editing sample?
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Can “AI” do fact-checking and quality assurance?
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Is a professional editor/reviewer really necessary when the budget is tight?
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