Speaker 1: What's the difference between proofreading, editing and revision? Coming up. Hello and welcome back to the Freelanceverse. Thanks so much for coming back to the channel, I hope you're all doing well. Today, as you see in the title, I want to talk to you about the differences and similarities of three services, language services, that you can offer that are inherently a bit similar but have very important differences. So let's talk about it. These three services are editing, proofreading and revision. The concept of all three are kind of similar in a sense that they are all performed after the fact that someone translated it, right? Mostly not you, mostly someone else did a translation and then you come in as a proofreader, as an editor or as a reviewer. While these steps are kind of at a similar stage in the localization process, they can have some very important distinctions and it's super important that you know exactly what your client wants from you, right? Because what I'm about to share in terms of what these mean for me is like the general consensus in the industry. But it can very well be that your client defines them differently, right? So if they commission you with an editing job or a proofreading job, it might be worth to just double check what they actually mean if they don't specify, right? So let's look at proofreading first. Proofreading is definitely by far the most simple of the three services. In a proofreading job the language service provider is asked to correct spelling and grammar of a job, of a text, right? So in a way the source becomes kind of irrelevant, right? You don't even need the source that much in a proofreading job because you're actually just reading the target, you're correcting all spelling and grammar mistakes. That is a proofreading. Your focus is on the correctness of the target text. Editing on the other hand is a very different story, that's a much more comprehensive task. But it also comes after the translation phase. Editing however, comparing to proofreading actually involves comparing the source and the target, right? So you're doing an actual comparison if the translator correctly translated the source to the target. You don't only look at spelling and grammar, you also do that part, so proofreading is part of editing. But on top of that you also look for stylistic problems, stylistic changes you make. You look at terminology used in this specific register. Is the terminology in this domain correct? Do they actually use these terms in the industry? You should also cross-check references. You know, you go to the reference part and you check if they actually are correct, right? You can't just have a reference there that makes no sense. You need to cross-check the references and cross-check if they actually say what is claimed in the translation. So in a way you're really making sure that you create a spotless correct translation of the source text, right? And of course in that sense editing takes much more time than proofreading, because proofreading is part of editing. In a way you can say it probably takes you about three times as much time editing than proofreading, so keep that in mind if someone asks you to perform an editing job. It's going to take you much more time. Service number three is called revision, and if you're asked to perform a revision, sometimes also called LQA, language quality assessment, you really have to take a step back from the text, right? Revision can be done before or after proofreading and editing phase, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that revision involves kind of analyzing the global, the text as a whole, the global coherence of the text. So you really look at the structure, at the document structure, the paragraph structure, you assess whether the whole document makes sense in a way, whether it confirms all the claims it makes, that's a very important point, whether it addresses the purpose of the document as well, whether it serves the correct target audience, as well as whether it's logical and understandable, that's very important. Like if there is a red thread throughout the whole document, especially in a larger document, revision stage is extremely important, or in a book for example, every chapter needs to make sense in the grand scheme of things, right? Another important point, I don't know if I've already mentioned it, but every claim that you make needs to be fulfilled, make sure that the references are correct and also check for consistency within the document and the transitions between paragraphs are super important, so it doesn't look choppy and it doesn't look kind of merged together, it needs to flow in a whole, yeah, like a symphony, you know, the whole document needs to make sense, so that's the revision part. Completely different from editing and proofreading and really this is quite rare that you are asked to do a revision job, so if someone asks you that they would really like tell you exactly what you have to do, so the distinction you have to make sure yourself that you know what to do is between editing and proofreading, revision is kind of detached from the two, but it's also super interesting. I would recommend to you to charge all of these three services by the hour if you can somehow, because you never know how much work it is, proofreading, editing, or revision. Proofreading, it doesn't matter that much, so I also do, quite often actually, also do proofreading by the word, you know, you would probably charge maybe half of your translation rate or usually like a third of your translation rate for proofreading, depends if you are asked to also cross-check the source, but you can go relatively quickly through a proofreading, right, you can do probably like, I don't know, 2000 words an hour or something, so it's much quicker than translation of course. So there I would understand to charge by the word, but editing and revision, make sure to ask the client to charge by the hour, because it can matter so much. Sometimes you don't have to correct anything, but you still have to edit the job, right, and then suddenly you are really... even some crazy clients, I don't even want to call them clients, they pay you by number of corrections you make, and that's insane, like never accept a job like this, that makes no sense, right, because then you get punished if it's a good translator, and it's not your job, right, you're still doing the revision, even though you don't have to change a lot of things, and then you don't get paid, so never accept being paid by number of revisions, that's insane, ask to be paid by the hour, that makes the most sense in my opinion. There you go, it's probably rather short, but you know, a practical video for all of you guys out there that struggle with the distinction between these services, so thanks so much for watching, and make sure to subscribe to the channel, like the video, we are still going strong, at the time of recording we just hit 16 000 subscribers, it's amazing, so 17 is the new goal, let's make that happen, thanks so much for watching, and I see you next Monday, bye-bye.