Revising and Editing for Translators

Brian Mossop

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351658232
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

Revising and Editing for Translators provides guidance and learning materials for translation students and professional translators learning to revise the work of others or edit original writing, and those wishing to improve their self-revision ability. Revising and editing are seen as reading skills aimed at spotting problematic passages. Changes are then made to meet some standard of quality that varies with the text and to tailor the text to its readership.

Mossop offers in-depth coverage of a wide range of topics, including copyediting, stylistic editing, checking for consistency, revising procedures and principles, and translation quality assessment—all related to the professional situations in which revisers and editors work. This revised fourth edition provides new chapters on revising machine outputs and news trans-editing, a new section on reviser competencies, and a completely new grading scheme for assignments.

The inclusion of suggested activities and exercises, numerous real-world examples, and a reference glossary make this an indispensable coursebook for professional translation programmes.

1 Why editing and revising are necessary

Why is it necessary for someone other than the writer or translator to check a text, and perhaps make changes, before it is sent off to readers? A very general simple answer is that we human beings do not do perfection. In every realm of activity, we make mistakes, sometimes serious ones, regardless of how experienced we are. Indeed, highly experienced people can be overly confident in their ability to avoid error. Translation agencies often refer to their ‘impeccable’ translations, but this can be put down to advertising hyperbole.

Of course, the impossibility of perfection also applies to editing and revising: no matter how carefully or how often you check a text, you can be sure that you will not find every single problem. As I went through the third edition of this book, I found a few out-and-out mistakes that had not been caught by me or by my editors.

In this chapter, we’ll look at several more specific reasons why editing and revising are necessary. First, it is extraordinarily easy to write sentences that are structured in such a way that readers will misunderstand them or have difficulty understanding them. Second, it is easy, while writing, to forget about the future readers and write something which is not suited to them or to the use they will make of the text. Third, a text may fail to conform to linguistic norms or to the reigning ideas about the proper way to translate or to write in a particular genre. Finally, what the author or translator has written may conflict with the publisher’s goals.

To deal with these problems, revisers and editors amend texts in two ways. First, they act as gatekeepers who ensure that the text conforms to society’s linguistic and textual norms and achieves the publisher’s goals. Second, they act as language therapists to ensure ease of mental processing and suitability of the text for its future users. This latter function is certainly important in the English-speaking world, but some language cultures do not value reader-orientation as highly; readers are expected to do more of the work of understanding themselves, bringing their background knowledge to bear on the task. In this kind of lingua-culture, one would not start an article by giving the reader a helpful overview of its structure (first I shall do this, then that); to do so would seem patronizing.

Editors and revisers often find themselves faced with conflicting demands and needs. There are demands from the client—the company, ministry or publishing house which has commissioned a writing or translating job. Then there are standards required by professional associations to which the editor/reviser belongs, and edicts from language-standardization or terminology-standardization bodies. Authors too make certain demands, and finally, editors and revisers must constantly keep in mind the requirements of readers. The need for revisers to deal with conflicting demands is discussed in Chapter 10.12.

Editing or revising is thus not a matter of a vague ‘looking over’. There are specific things the editor or reviser is looking for. Here are just a few of the many different ways in which a text might be defective:

• There are many typing errors.
• Sometimes the main numbered headings are bolded, and sometimes they are italicized.
• There are unidiomatic word combinations.
• You often have to read a sentence twice to get the point.
• You often come across a word like ‘it’ or ‘they’ and you cannot tell what it refers to.
• The text contains a great many words which the readers won’t understand because they are not very highly educated, or because they are not experts in the subject matter of the text.
• The text is not written in a way appropriate to the genre. For example, it is a recipe, but it does not begin with a list of ingredients, it is rather vague about how to make the dish, and it is full of commentary on the history of the dish and the chefs who are famous for making it.
• If the text is a narrative, it is hard to follow the sequence of events. If it is an argument, it is hard to follow the steps.
• There are passages which contradict each other.

1.1 The difficulty of writing

In this section, we’ll look at why texts need therapy to help readers. Writing is difficult work. In this it is quite different from speaking, which is easy (despite being highly complex in terms of the physiological processes involved). We all learn to converse, without any formal instruction, during infancy. Writing, on the contrary, requires long years of apprenticeship and even then, many people never learn to do it well. Indeed, even the best writers and translators make mistakes—sometimes serious ones. There is no point in seeking out writers and translators who are so good that their work never needs to be checked.

Why is writing so difficult? There are three main reasons. First, there is no immediate feedback from readers. If you are conversing, a question from your interlocutor or a puzzled expression on their face will lead you to repeat or rephrase in order to make your message clear. If you are writing, however, you may create an ambiguous sentence, or use a word the reader doesn’t know, but there is no one there to react to the problem, so you do not notice it. This is part of a larger difference between speech and writing: a conversation is jointly constructed by at least two people who are together in a situation, while in writing (other than text messaging) the main burden of successful communication falls on the writer. The writer must imagine the reactions of an often unknown reader in an unknown future situation, anticipate the reader’s problems in receiving the intended message and act to forestall them.

The clerk who posted the message ‘back in 30 minutes’ on the shop door failed to anticipate the reader’s problems. If I come along and read this message, I don’t know whether the shop will re-open in 1 minute, 10 minutes or 29 minutes. The clerk should have written ‘back at 10:45’.

To write successfully, it is necessary to be constantly aware of what your future readers do not know (it’s not part of their likely background knowledge or you have not already told them earlier in the text). Poor writers forget this. They treat writing as self-expression rather than communication with others. They seem to operate on the principle that if they have a certain meaning in mind as they write, that meaning will automatically come across to readers. Many examples can be found in Wikipedia: the articles are supposed to be ‘accessible and understandable by as many readers as possible’ (Wikipedia: Writing better articles), but contributors to the encyclopedia often seem unable to put themselves in the shoes of likely readers. The result is articles that are very hard to understand and need major editing!

A second reason writing is difficult: written documents tend to be lengthy. When speaking, you typically need to organize what you are saying over a stretch of a couple of words to a couple of dozen words (the delivery of lengthy monologues such as formal speeches is usually assisted by speakers’ notes or scripts). In writing, things are quite different. Unless you are tweeting, preparing a grocery list or sending a very brief email, you typically need to organize a stretch of a few hundred or a few thousand words in the case of a report or article, or a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of words if you are writing a book. Despite my best efforts, you may find inconsistencies from one part of this book to another!

Third, it is easy to forget to compensate for lack of intonation and gestures. In conversation, much meaning is conveyed through intonation, and to some extent also by gestures (facial expressions, body posture, hand movements such as pointing). It is very easy to forget to compensate for the lack of intonation in writing, and the result will be ambiguity, or an unclear connection between successive passages. Consider this sentence:

As these studies tend to show the form translation has taken in Canada, both on an institutional level and on the level of the actual practice of translation, is specific to our particular national context.

Here the reader might wrongly take ‘the form’ to be the object of ‘show’, whereas in fact, it is the subject of ‘is specific’. In speech, the voice would drop slightly when pronouncing the word ‘show’ and there would be a slight pause. The writer forgot to place a comma after ‘show’ to ensure a correct reading.

Writing a translation, aside from being subject to the three difficulties just described, is also difficult because of the need to convey someone else’s meaning. The translator is often not a member of the intended readership of either the source text or the translation. As a result, it’s easy to convey to readers a meaning not present in the source text, or to write in a way that will confuse the intended readership. In addition, it is very difficult when translating to avoid undesirable linguistic influences seeping in from the source language.

Good writers and translators recognize how easy it is to err. To minimize errors in their final output, they engage in some combination of planning and self-­editing. One study of writing strategies found four basic strategies:

Writing strategy	Planning before drafting	Self-editing
Architect	Major	Minimal, after drafting
Bricklayer	Major	Major, during drafting
Watercolourist	Minimal	Minimal, during drafting
Oil painter	Minimal	Major, during & after drafting

Some writers (‘architects’ and ‘bricklayers’) forestall error by thinking through their message carefully before they start composing; sometimes they will even prepare a detailed outline. A few of these writers—the ‘architects’—are apparently so good at planning that they manage to produce good writing on the first draft, writing that requires only minimal self-editing after they have got the draft down. ‘Bricklayers’, on the contrary, do major self-editing as they draft.

Quite different are the ‘watercolourists’ and ‘oil painters’. They tend to think by writing, so there is little planning. They simply start writing, perhaps with just a theme or a single idea in mind, or a few scribbled notes. Watercolourists, in addition to their minimalist planning, also engage in little self-editing. As a result, watercolourists are generally not very good writers. Oil painters compensate for their lack of planning by engaging in major self-editing both during and after drafting. The first edition of the book you are now reading was oilpainted: planning was limited to preparing a rudimentary outline for the publisher. Then I wrote each chapter fairly quickly, though with a fair amount of editing as I went along. After completing a chapter, I made major changes, often completely rearranging the order of presentation of the material, and then I made changes to those changes.

Translators too use different writing strategies, which will be discussed at length in Chapter 14.

Exercise 1

Take a few minutes to consider the following questions and then tell the group about your approach to writing.

1. a) When you are writing in (not translating into) your own language, which of Chandler’s four strategies do you adopt? Are you an architect, bricklayer, watercolourist or oil painter? Or do you use more than one of the strategies, depending on the nature of the writing project?
2. b) Do you identify with none of the four strategies? Say why not.
3. c) If you identify yourself as, say, a bricklayer, have you always been a bricklayer? Did you learn one strategy at school and then switch later?
4. d) Do you use similar strategies when writing and when translating? For example, if you plan your writing extensively, do you also do a lot of preparation before you begin to draft your translations? If you make many changes while writing, do you also make many changes while drafting you...