Translated Text Polishing Editing and Proofreading Services

A company has its product documentation translated into English, and the translation is accurate. Checked sentence against sentence with the original, there is nothing to correct. Support tickets rise anyway, and the complaint is consistent: the manual is correct and unusable. The same component carries three names across four pages, because three passages were translated at different times. Each paragraph opens where the source language opens and an English reader looks somewhere else for the point. The connectives are faithful renderings of words that do a different job in the language they came from. Every sentence passed. The document did not.

We edit text that has already been rendered into English — translated manuals and product documentation, marketing and website copy, subtitles and voice scripts, annual reports and investor material, academic articles prepared for English-language journals, policy and compliance documents, and machine-translated drafts that need bringing up to publishable English.

The cohesion of a translated document is what determines whether accurate sentences add up to a text anyone can read, and its failure is fidelity achieved one sentence at a time in a language that builds its meaning across them. We work through these so a term is settled once and used everywhere it occurs, since English readers take a changed word to mean a changed thing, and a component with three names is three components to everyone who was not present for the translation; so connectives are chosen for the work they do in English rather than matched to the word in the source, because therefore, moreover and in addition are not interchangeable, and a literal equivalent regularly announces a relation the two sentences do not have; so each paragraph is reopened where an English reader looks for its point, given that languages place the weight of a paragraph differently and a faithful order can leave the point where nobody is reading; so sentence length and subordination are rebuilt rather than carried over, since a structure that is unremarkable in the source can arrive as a chain of clauses an English reader has to take apart before they can use it; and so what a passage does is preserved even where what it says is adjusted — an instruction stays an instruction and a warning stays a warning — given that the politeness conventions of the source language can turn a mandatory step into a suggestion, and a reader will treat it as one. Translations edited this way can be followed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including source documents, draft translations and unpublished material. We are editors rather than translators: we work on the English in front of us, and we do not check it against your source text or confirm that the translation is faithful. Where meaning looks as though it may have shifted, we query rather than decide — if the accuracy of the translation itself is in doubt, that is work for a qualified translator. What we can do is make sure sentences that are each correct add up to a document somebody can use.