Refugee and Settlement Services Editing and Proofreading Services

Settlement services write for people who arrived recently, are managing several systems at once in a language they may be learning, and have often been given a great deal of information at moments when they could not absorb any of it. The organisation knows how registration, housing, schools and benefits work; the person does not, and nothing in their previous life makes the local arrangement predictable. Material written by someone who has never had to work these systems out from nothing tends to answer the wrong questions in the wrong order.

We edit what refugee, migrant and settlement organisations produce — orientation and welcome material for new arrivals, information on registration, housing, health, schools and benefits, asylum process explanations and rights information, appointment letters and reminders, interpreter and translation guidance, English language and employment programme material, community sponsorship and host family documentation, casework and support planning records, safeguarding and trafficking indicators guidance, volunteer and befriender handbooks, funding applications and reports, community and public communications, and the English source text that becomes the translated versions. Our editors work on source text prepared for translation and interpreting.

Information written for someone with no local context is a distinct skill, and the most common failure is assuming shared background rather than shared language. A leaflet accurately translated into Tigrinya is still useless if it says to register with a GP without explaining what a GP is, that registration is free, that it does not require immigration status to be resolved, that it is not connected to the asylum decision, and that it must happen before a person is ill rather than when they are. We write these so each step names what the institution is and what it does before naming the action; so anything free is labelled free, because the assumption otherwise is that it is not; so any interaction with immigration status is addressed directly rather than left as a fear that prevents people acting; so the order matches what must genuinely happen first; and so the source English is clean enough to translate without the translator having to interpret it. Where a document will be read aloud by an interpreter, we structure it for that.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including casework, asylum material and information about identifiable people. We are editors rather than immigration, legal or welfare advisers, and we offer no view on any case, entitlement or immigration question. What we can do is make information usable by someone encountering these systems for the first time.