Your professional translator

For the past two weeks I've been mainly doing proofreading and editing projects. I would like to share a lesson that I learned through one of my editing projects. There were two proofreaders who worked with the text. (The project was huge, so the proofreading work was divided between two people). The first proofreader obviously thought anyone can proofread translated texts . After all, if you speak two languages why not earn some extra money? That was the first time in my freelancing career when I realized that a proofreader can actually make a text worse, not better. How? Well, this person didn't check the spelling or grammar, and if he did, he obviously didn't bother about being consistent with the changes he made. He even changed the right grammar into wrong (!) and did everything possible to make the translation sound as literal as possible. (The client needed the text that sounded natural, not funny. So I was quite surprised that this proofreader actually thought t

Hi everybody! How are you? First of all, sorry for having been silent for 2 weeks. The reason is simple and trivial: I've been extremely busy. One of my recent projects has actually given me an idea for one of my next blog posts. It's going to be about proofreading. I still need to think it over and, hopefully, you will see it next week. I am very happy to be so busy now. My daughter's summer vacation starts soon, so it would be nice to earn some extra money now in order to work part-time the rest of the summer and spend as much time with my beautiful daughter as possible! Besides, we are starting the remodeling in our apartment. Hopefully, we'll be able to finish everything before July 16th. My niece is getting married on July 16th, and according to the Russian tradition the groom has to 'buy out' his bride. The process does involve some money, but the poor groom also has to do a number of funny tasks if he really wants to get married. So, since my nie

Good evening everybody! Hope you are doing well and enjoying this wonderful weekend. My weekend has been going very well and I am very thankful for this time of long walks with my daughter, rest, joy and peace. This week has brought an unexpected but good surprise to me as my Facebook page was nominated for Top 100 Language Lovers Competition hosted by bab.la language portal and Lexiophiles blog . You can find out more about the whole process here . Right now it's the nomination stage. You can nominate any language blog, Facebook page or Twitter user. Here's what it says in the Lexiophiles blog about the 1st stage: "As always, we need your help to find the best of the best for the following categories: 1. Language Learning Blogs (blogs about language learning & teaching) 2. Language Professionals Blogs (blogs from translators, interpreters etc. on the professional usage of languages) 3. Language Facebook Pages (Facebook pages about language, language learning etc.)