Understanding the Key Differences Between Proofreading and Editing Services (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Karina, tell me the difference, what's the difference between proofreading and editing?

Speaker 2: Yes, those are two services that we offer and we try to distinguish between them. Editing we consider to be substantive editing, developmental editing, which just means that there can be for example rewriting of sentences, restructuring of sentences. In the case of proofreading, for example, we're really staying on the surface. It is a job that is equally difficult to editing. A proofreader is not necessarily, is absolutely not actually, a junior editor. A proofreader is someone who has very good eyes, who has, you know, someone who has many hours of experience doing only that, and is really in a position to spot things that just lie on the surface that a normal reader has a tendency to skip over. And the editor is really getting into the meat of the text. They're thinking about how things could be expressed more effectively and they may not even be at the stage of really being able to have that superficial vision of the text. So what often happens after editing is proofreading, actually, and that's something that a lot of people don't think about. And because an editor, in a way, is doing work that is equally difficult to what a translator is doing. And just as a translator's work needs to be reviewed, because a translator is reworking things, they're changing things, they're focusing on different aspects of the text, an editor's work also needs to be proofread for that same reason. But they're looking for different things.