Speaker 1: Do you need a proofreader for your translations? Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelance Verse. So in this week's video I want to talk to you about proofreading. When you're first starting out as a translator you probably don't give proofreading much thought yet. You just want to translate, right? Or you want to have proofreading as a service. More on that a bit later. But proofreading your own translations becomes really important when you start working in the territory of direct clients. Let me talk to you a bit more about that. So when you're working with agencies, with translation agencies, the proofreading workflow is usually taken care of by the agency. They would have a step implemented in their workflow so when you deliver your translation it's proofread by another professional. Usually you'll see that when you get a job through a CAD tool like STL or MemoQ. You can see in the workflow, in the steps, there is a step for translation, a step for review one and a step for review two. You can usually see if there is another person in the one of the reviews. So once you deliver your step in the CAD tool it automatically goes to the inbox of this person in the review, right? Even though I say that most agencies have this implemented, I focus on most because I know of some agencies who deliver without proofreading. Especially if they trust the translator very much or if it's just a very short job that they think, you know, you can just deliver it, it's going to be fine. And because I know that I make sure to include a little paragraph in the delivery email that I send to the clients stating that I did my best of course, I translated to the best of my abilities. However to ensure 100% or a near 100% there's never 100% guarantee even if it's proofread, but to guarantee a near 100% perfection it should be proofread by another native. That's just a clause I include in my emails for clients that I know that sometimes they deliver without proofreading. When it comes to working with direct clients however, so companies or also private people or any other organization that are not for profit, then no one checks your translation usually, right? Unless the company has an internal translation department that will probably proofread your work as well, but you can't bank on that like what you do with an agency, right? So in this case it's important that you have your own proofreading workflow in place. Now usually translators work with colleagues or friends that they can trust and that are also translators and they exchange work to proofread each other's translations. Not only for proofreading actually, I work with a colleague and whenever he has too much work and he knows that I have some time, he gives me jobs and also vice versa. I give him jobs whenever I feel overwhelmed. With this way you can really establish a nice collaboration. So when I'm working for a direct client how it would usually work I would do the translation and then hopefully if I have enough time I would leave it till the next day. So I would sleep on it and then the next day I would proofread it myself and then I would send it to my colleague for additional proofreading by another pair of eyes. Then he sends me back the reviewed version, I check his reviews, I implement them or I don't implement them depending on what I feel. There are always stylistic changes as well so not every review gets implemented immediately. And then I do a final formatting check and then it goes to the client. So there are a lot of workflows implemented there, right? What it means of course you have to charge enough so you can account for all these steps and you can pay your colleague as well because he wants to do this for free, right? It's also his job. So not only do you charge your translation rate but you also charge the proofreading rate and usually whenever I can, whenever it's possible, I also charge a formatting rate if the client wants a final formatted file, right? You can of course deliver without an additional proofreader by a second pair of eyes. I know plenty of people who don't work with a proofreader. Yeah, just make sure to keep enough distance between your translation and your proofreading because you know the mind really sees what it expects to see, right? So if you worked for two hours on a translation, you won't see the little nuances like when you have an R and an N and an R switched around within a word, your mind won't see it anymore if you were the one that did the translation. However, if someone else reads it or if you read it with enough distance, the mind is cleared again and they can see these little differences. However, even then, just discounts for in any case, just always use the spellchecker from Word. Even if you work in a CAD tool, always export it. Even if you work in an Excel, always export it or copy it into a Word and use the spellcheck. Yeah, things that the spellchecker can correct are mistakes that you can't really justify to your client, right? Anything else, stylistic reasons, whatever formatting, you can always make a case for yourself but if you deliver an error that the Word spellchecker would correct you, there's nothing really to justify, right? It's just a mistake that you missed in your quality assurance. So now let's talk a bit more about the service of proofreading because it's a service you can actually offer to expand your business, right? To expand your translation business. You're not only a translator, you're also an editor, you're also a proofreader, you're a language expert, right? Keep this in mind. You can offer this without additional education which is the cool thing about it, right? If you have a translation degree, that's perfectly fine. If you have a language degree, it's perfectly fine. If you don't have a degree but a lot of experience, like I mentioned many times in my video, you don't necessarily need a degree. You can also offer proofreading. It kind of goes synonymous. Of course, there are people who simply offer editing or proofreading services. It's perfectly fine. They are experts in this field but you can always offer both. I love offering it. For some clients, I only do proofreading. I think it's a great service for me personally. It works very well because I get bored quite quickly when I do a big job. So I'm not a fan of doing huge translation jobs. Like translating a book for me would be not suitable. It would be kind of the worst. But proofreading a book, however, I did that once and it was cool because it's not that long, right? And you still have the cool aspect of actually working on a real book. So yes, I offer proofreading both for direct clients, agency clients, as well as private clients, actually. Mostly cover letters or academic papers. I really like to do academic papers, bachelor thesis, master thesis. I actually printed once a flyer and I drove with the car all around Switzerland and I put my flyer in every university and college that I could find and tried to get some bachelor thesis like this. And it worked out a bit. Like I got two or three requests, I think, through it. But it's, yeah, it's just fun. You need to be creative to get to these private clients, right? How would you do that otherwise? Make sure you always know exactly what the client asks from you because there's a difference between editing and proofreading. The difference is not always clear. So different clients will use different specifications. In general, I can tell you that proofreading just looks at the spelling, at the grammar, and anything else. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, of course, if you don't include that into spelling. Whereas editing goes further. Editing also looks at stylistic changes, formatting, consistency. You will check references as well. You will check, for example, if the chapters make sense, if the headings make sense, if the headings actually describe what comes in the next paragraph, you know. So it's much more work, much more work. Whenever I can, I try to charge editing and proofreading by the hour and not by the word. It's not really common though, so you really need to push for that. So I always try to push for it because agencies will want you to work with a per word rate for editing and proofreading as well. I don't recommend it because it can really backfire a lot. You never know what the quality is like, right? You never know how long this will take you. For a translation, you can judge it way better. Of course, some translations will take much longer, but still, in general, it depends on you how long it takes and not on the actual source text, on the other person, right? Proofreading depends a lot on how the translation or how the original piece is written. I've proofread some bachelor theses that were, quite frankly, terrible, horrifying, and there it just takes so much longer to edit. Whereas other master theses or bachelor theses are written almost to perfection. All I do is very small stylistic changes and comprehension. I maybe ask a few questions like, maybe, do you think you can assume that the reader knows that? Or me personally, I'm not an expert in your field, I wouldn't know this exactly. What's your audience? Is it experts? Is it lay people? So these kind of very overall meta questions. So whenever you can, make sure to charge by the hour. So I really urge you to offer proofreading services next to your translation if you don't do that already. You will see there's a lot of work out there for proofreading, not only on all the platforms I mentioned in my How to Find Jobs video. You can click here if you're interested. But also, once you established a relationship with a client for translation, just ask them, you know, ask them, do you also need proofreading? Do you also need editing? You should always promote that you're the complete language package, right? You're not just a translator, you're a language expert that can give consultancy insights as well, that can give information about localization. You can do proofreading, editing, translation, reviews, final checks before printing. All this you can offer within the translation framework. So don't just limit yourself to translation. But yeah, explore all these opportunities that you have as a language expert. That's all I got. Thanks so much for watching. If you would like to be more involved in the freelance voice, make sure to check out the first link in the description that leads you to my Patreon. Otherwise, as always, thanks so much for being here, spending your valuable time watching this video. I really appreciate it a lot. It's great. Get in touch with me through LinkedIn or through the comments if you want to chat more. See you next Monday with another video. Bye-bye.