Note: this article is the conclusion on proofreading experience of document translation in recent twenty years made by HYW Translation Company, which is suitable for reading by each translator and client. The translation errors and problems mentioned in this article are required to be taken care of and overcome by translators, whose translations have more such problems are not qualified translators and whose translations seldom have such problems are excellent translators and such translators are most welcome by translation companies.             

1. Eliminate clerical errors;
The clerical errors refer to situations what you write is not what you think due to carelessness or inattention and other reasons. For example, what you clearly want to write in the mind is “good”, but actually what you write is “not good”. What you originally want to write in the mind is “647”, but actually what you write is “547”.

Such problems are not much bigger, but they will make readers feel very bad. In general case, it is understandable if there are few wrongly written characters in an article, but if in a great occasion, it is unforgivable even though there is a wrongly written character. Therefore, translators need to self-proofread or let someone else to proofread so as to eliminate these wrongly written characters as many as possible.

The numeric errors belong to gross errors. Sometimes, certain translators mistake the decimal point or digit number, which will cause serious consequences, especially the translation task of legal documents. Therefore, we should make an emphasis on the digital proofreading.

In the process of typesetting, our typesetting personnel shall proofread the translation against the original simultaneously so as to maximally check the omission out from the translation. The proofreading of Chinese translations is especially the strong point of our Chinese people and it is easy to eliminate them through proofreading if there are omissions in Chinese translations.

Some translators are not skillful at typewriting and therefore some inexplicable words often appear in the translations. If they are not eliminated through proofreading, it will make readers very confused. The proofreading of typewriting errors is the hardest, which can be eliminated only through proofreading word for word and sentence for sentence and thus it wastes time and energy very much. Therefore, we ask translators to try to improve the level of typewriting.

Not all translators have a good command of and observe Chinese grammar. When proofreading translations, we always find that some sentences have grammatical mistakes.

When translating, translators should try to clearly express meanings required to be expressed and should not use too long sentence. One important work of proofreading is to straighten out, split and re-express these unintelligible sentences. Try to avoid using too many pronouns and appropriately replace pronouns which are easy to produce ambiguities with nouns, which require very proper understanding on original texts. Chinese text proofreading personnel must have higher English reading comprehensive ability and Chinese expression ability than those of translators of first draft, so as to do well in Chinese text proofreading at this level. Experienced proofreading personnel read the translation sentence for sentence firstly and then check against the original text when encountering problems. However, the situations of perpetrating a fraud on purpose by translators shall also be prevented. Some translations are very coherent, but once against the original, you will find that they completely digress from meanings of the original and the translator fabricates wild tales. We met such a translator ten years ago. Therefore, when proofreading, proofreading personnel shall appropriately contrast with the original and shall not read the translation only, even though the translation apparently seems like very smooth.

The highest state of proofreading personnel is accurately and rapidly finding mistranslations. The proofreading personnel shall have comprehensive common sense, basic knowledge of the major involved in translations and strict logical thinking ability so as to cultivate the penetrating insight to identify mistranslations.

The translation of specialized vocabularies is one of difficulties in translation. Although we identify the technicality of each document which is prepared to be translated, and then arrange translators who is professional counterpart to translate it, many professional documents are compound type, that is to say, the same document has vocabularies belonging to several different majors. In order to increase efficiency, we sometimes do not take apart a small document and arrange several translators with different majors to translate it, but arrange a translator to translate it in accordance with its main technicality and ask him to look up vocabularies which are not quite clear in many ways, even consult with other counterpart translators or bring them up and solve them by translation companies. When proofreading, we also do so.

As for large files which are completed by many persons, unifying through the full text must be conducted. For the same article and the same batch of documents, translation of the same vocabularies and sentences which appear frequently must be uniform; otherwise, ambiguity will be produced and readers and users cannot figure them out. The ability of unification is one of core abilities of senior proofreading personnel and translation companies.