When You Proofread My Work, Please Make It Absolutely Perfect
The sad fact here is that no proofreader can be one hundred per cent accurate. This is the case for various reasons, and it’s important to understand why it is that your work might not be perfect when you get it back.
Effects of Context
The first reason is one of context. No proofreader will understand all the work they see; they have an area of expertise, and outside of this there will always be context – the examples that immediately spring to mind are subject-specific terminology and terminology introduced by the author of the work they’re reading – that they have not previously encountered, which might lead to spurious corrections on occasion.
Effects of Quality of Work
The second reason is one of quality of work. A proofreader will see varying qualities of English, and to put it bluntly, the lower the quality of your work, the less accurate, or indeed useful, the corrections will be. Consider, for instance, a poorly structured academic document that confuses tenses, has missing articles and pronouns, is generally badly explained, and has a poor or confused overall structure.
It’s not really reasonable to expect a proofreader to be able to turn such a piece of writing into a smooth, competent piece of writing that meets the academic requirements without extensive rewriting, which is quite specifically against academic standards. Therefore I can only indicate to you where such work is confusing, vague, poorly structured, advise on how you might go about changing it and suggest that you do so. Also note that where such sections of text are too confusing to understand properly, or indeed at all, I will not do corrections; such sections generally need to be rewritten, so suggesting basic corrections to language and punctuation would be pointless.
Google Translate
As a rather extreme example, I am on rare occasions sent work that has been generated entirely from Google Translate (re: gibberish) from someone’s native language with the request to “make it perfect”, in the apparent expectation that I can turn it into Shakespearian prose. Clearly, this is never going to happen!
Google Translate might be good for a few words, or perhaps short sentences at a stretch. However, don’t use it to translate a whole document. A practical example might be to translate a known sentence from your own language into English, and then back-translate the results:
Original English: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs“
French translation: “Le renard brun rapide a sauté par-dessus les chiens paresseux“
Back translation to English: “The swift brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs“
Already there are differences, and this is despite the sentence being a stock phrase (it is famous for using every letter of the English alphabet).
Thesaurus
The thesaurus is a slightly less extreme example of introducing problems into your text. The thing to bear in mind here is that the context of the synonyms the typical online thesaurus gives you are not the same as the word you’re attempting to translate/change. They can be useful, but use any thesaurus with caution.
Literal Translation of Idiom and Metaphore
This is an issue that crops up quite frequently, where a client has literally translated an idiom or metaphor from their own language (examples: the Chinese, “The rice is already cooked”, or the Swedish, “You can’t just slide in on a shrimp sandwich”). Sometime these work but more often they don’t, and when they don’t work they are incredibly confusing! My advice here is to avoid their literal translation, and rather consider what they actually mean and translate this.
What Can I Expect Then?
A general rule of thumb is that the better (worse) the quality of the work, the better (less good) will be the quality and/or utility of the proofreading. Ultimately, the better I can understand what you’re trying to say, the better the chances I will understand your meanings and the better the associated corrections.
I refer you to an article by the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) about proofreading and proof-editing in general, but that discusses issues such the expected standards of such in some detail (see the section: ‘Will a proofreader make my work perfect?’).
As ever, if you’re uncertain about any of the above, or would like to send me a short piece of work to see what kind of work I can do for you, please do contact me.
