Poll: How do you perceive the results of reviews/proofreading after you sumbitted your work to an agency? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
|
|---|
This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "How do you perceive the results of reviews/proofreading after you sumbitted your work to an agency?".
View the poll results »
| | | |
A small number of my customers (direct clients and translation agencies) ask for a ready-to-print service, so these texts are reviewed in-house. For most of my customers I ignore if my work is proofread, reviewed or edited or not, with two exceptions and in these cases I know who the proofreader/reviewer/editor is and we exchange views quite often. Of course, over the years I also had some bad experiences. A few years back one of my customers (a Japanese company) picked a Spanish proofreader and... See more A small number of my customers (direct clients and translation agencies) ask for a ready-to-print service, so these texts are reviewed in-house. For most of my customers I ignore if my work is proofread, reviewed or edited or not, with two exceptions and in these cases I know who the proofreader/reviewer/editor is and we exchange views quite often. Of course, over the years I also had some bad experiences. A few years back one of my customers (a Japanese company) picked a Spanish proofreader and it took some time and a lot of emails back and forth for him to understand that Spanish and Portuguese, though related, are quite different! ▲ Collapse
| | | |
Kay Denney 
France
Local time: 13:18
French to English
It depends. There's one agency that sends me proofread versions of my translations: I see that they do make small improvements here and there and I make a note of them for future use. Recently they sent me back a version with comments from their client and I was happy to see that they defended my translation.
Most agencies don't bother though. A few will come back with questions now and then.
Direct clients do come back with questions and suggestions. I welcome them: ... See more It depends. There's one agency that sends me proofread versions of my translations: I see that they do make small improvements here and there and I make a note of them for future use. Recently they sent me back a version with comments from their client and I was happy to see that they defended my translation.
Most agencies don't bother though. A few will come back with questions now and then.
Direct clients do come back with questions and suggestions. I welcome them: I explain my reasoning when my version is better, and I make a note in a glossary whenever their version is better. ▲ Collapse
| | | |
Alex Lichanow
Germany
Local time: 13:18
Member (2020)
English to German
+ ...
I don't often receive any feedback, much less insights into the changes made. In the few instances that I did actually get to see the changes, the majority were preferential, with a few actual stylistic improvements and one instance where I failed to spot a typo.
| | |
|
|
|
neilmac
Spain
Local time: 13:18
Spanish to English
+ ...
I haven't worked within agencies for a few years now. When I did, any time I was asked to compare my translations or reviews with those of their in-house proofreader, I was okay with the results. No complaints.
Slightly off topic, I wonder if anyone else finds it amusing that "submitted" is misspelt in this proofreading-related query...
[Edited at 2024-03-12 09:20 GMT]
| | | |
| With a jaded sense of disappointment, usually | Mar 12 |
Most corrections seem to be of a similar quality to the wording of this poll.
| | | |
One client sends a rather horrendous automatic email saying whether I have passed or not passed their internal editing process, with a link to the changes. Sometimes it says that I haven't passed, but then I look at the changes, take a deep breath and realise that a lot of native English speakers love to look for synonyms and waste time rewording perfectly fine work.
I didn't see this was an issue among the Spanish/Catalan speakers when I worked in-house, but the native English spe... See more One client sends a rather horrendous automatic email saying whether I have passed or not passed their internal editing process, with a link to the changes. Sometimes it says that I haven't passed, but then I look at the changes, take a deep breath and realise that a lot of native English speakers love to look for synonyms and waste time rewording perfectly fine work.
I didn't see this was an issue among the Spanish/Catalan speakers when I worked in-house, but the native English speakers were always trying to show of their knowledge of odd vocabulary... I wonder if others have come across this? ▲ Collapse
| | | |
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida wrote:
and it took some time and a lot of emails back and forth for him to understand that Spanish and Portuguese, though related, are quite different!
This is really unbelievable
| | |
|
|
|
Elizabeth Gomes
Brazil
Local time: 08:18
Member (2020)
English to Portuguese
I got mixed results. Some agencies do not send me any feedback at all. Other agencies make only relevant changes, if any.
| | | |
Alex Lichanow
Germany
Local time: 13:18
Member (2020)
English to German
+ ...
| Reviewer busybodies | Mar 12 |
patransword wrote:
I didn't see this was an issue among the Spanish/Catalan speakers when I worked in-house, but the native English speakers were always trying to show of their knowledge of odd vocabulary... I wonder if others have come across this?
German reviewers tend to be absolutely horrible in this regard. My impression is that some of them feel the urge to justify their existence as reviewers by "rephrasing" translations with needless synonyms (because who cares about stuff like glossary entries and consistency, right?) and then be even more needlessly smug about it.
And then there are Swiss German reviewers who don't seem to realize that there are differences between Swiss and German Standard German - and are smug about that, too.
| | | |
Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 13:18
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
+ ...
I don’t work with agencies that use cheap random proofreaders.
If I work in a team, we work in a collaborative way, taking turns and letting everyone give one suggestion on some relevant point/aspect. And then we discuss it and come to a final conclusion about these points. No neurotic/psychotic/ego-tripping reactions, just collaboration.
| | | |
| The industry is generally bananas (and most end-clients don't know it) | Mar 19 |
Alex Lichanow wrote:
My impression is that some of them feel the urge to justify their existence as reviewers by "rephrasing" translations with needless synonyms (because who cares about stuff like glossary entries and consistency, right?)...
If you send drawings of airplanes to an agency, once in a while a proofreader will remove one wing and replace it with a banana. Most likely the project manager will accept the banana (inherent bias). You may send 1000 images of airplanes to the project manager to prove to her that the banana is wrong, but it's very likely that she will hide your evidence, because she is in love with the proofreader and their bananas.
If the project manager needs an explanation, they will ask you to prove that the banana is wrong. The proofreader is a sacred entity (Official Holder of the Bananas), never to be asked.
This was never a reliable industry, with the production side mostly run by NPCs (especially the large companies). You have to find a way to not worry about it, preferably another source(s) of income so that you can dump the translation industry garbage anytime you want.
Do not think of the translation industry as an engineering project, think of it as a "modern banana art" exhibition.
| | |
|
|
|
| Accept good changes | Mar 20 |
Reject bad ones with comments. The final decision is usually mine unless they insist on the changes for some reason even though their reasoning may be flawed, in which case I just stop caring. This was a standard workflow with my previous employer. With my current one, I also get to finalize important translation like standards, etc. Once I accepted too many of their changes for the sake of being nice and the manager thought that it was because I must have done a bad job. There's no way I'd done... See more Reject bad ones with comments. The final decision is usually mine unless they insist on the changes for some reason even though their reasoning may be flawed, in which case I just stop caring. This was a standard workflow with my previous employer. With my current one, I also get to finalize important translation like standards, etc. Once I accepted too many of their changes for the sake of being nice and the manager thought that it was because I must have done a bad job. There's no way I'd done a bad job then although they did point out a couple of spots where my attention had failed me ▲ Collapse
| | | |
Login to reply/comment 
