Finding Mistakes in Your Translation

Everyone makes mistakes. The question is: will you find them when you check your translation before sending it off to your client? In this webinar, we’ll look at checking procedures that can increase the likelihood of finding mistakes. You can’t correct a mistake until you’ve found it! What counts as a mistake? It depends on your concept of quality. Quality in translation is not the topic of this webinar, but we’ll look briefly at three concepts of quality. We’ll do a few exercises, and we’ll take a few polls of participants so that everyone can find out how the other participants do their checking. Do they check on screen or on paper? Do they compare their translation to the source text or just read their translation? When comparing source and translation, do they read a sentence of the source first or the translation first? Different people do their checking work differently, but does it matter? Is there a best way? The answer is no, and yes. Since checking takes time (time when you could be moving on to the next translation), you need to be sure that you are using your checking time effectively. We’ll look at some time-wasting activities and some principles to keep in mind to avoid wasting time.