Translation Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

Translation agencies sit between a client who cannot read the deliverable and a translator who cannot see the context. That is a structurally difficult position, and most of what goes wrong in it is traceable to a brief that never existed. A client sends a document and asks for it in German; the agency assigns it; the translation comes back accurate and wrong — too formal for a marketing site, or too loose for a document that will be read by a regulator — and nobody can say who should have known.

We edit what translation agencies and language service providers produce — translation briefs and project specifications, client onboarding questionnaires, translator and reviewer instructions, glossaries and terminology databases, style guides for target languages and markets, quality assurance frameworks and error typologies, reviewer feedback forms and change categorisation, machine translation post-editing guidelines, certification and sworn translation documentation, service descriptions and quotation templates, subject-matter specialisation profiles, vendor management and freelancer onboarding material, and client-facing explanations of process and turnaround. Our editors work on the English source and on the agency's own documentation rather than on target-language text.

The brief is the document that determines everything downstream and is usually replaced by a file name. A translator needs the purpose the text will serve, the audience and their relationship to the client, the register, the variant of the target language and the market, what must not change — product names, legal terms, quoted material — what may be adapted freely, whether the text will be laid out afterwards and to what space, and who answers questions and how fast. We build briefs that carry that, and pair them with a reviewer feedback form that categorises changes rather than merely listing them: an error of meaning, a terminology inconsistency against the glossary, a register mismatch, and a preferential change that is neither right nor wrong. That last category is the one that matters most, because ungraded reviewer feedback is how agencies lose good translators to arguments about somebody's stylistic taste, and how clients conclude a translation was poor when it was merely different from what a reviewer would have written.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client documents, vendor terms and quality records. We are editors rather than translators, and we do not evaluate target-language texts or certify any translation. What we can do is make your source text clean, your briefs complete and your quality documentation usable by a distributed vendor pool.