Background of the Course

Proofreading is the process of finding and fixing misspelled words, grammatical errors, parts with poor readability, parts that have vague meaning, or other problems that would pose a difficulty to the reader in your own writing or other people’s writing. For a writer, proofreading his/her own writing is a very obvious thing to do. At the end of the day, the translator’s job is writing, and there could be small or large mistakes that were made during your work process, and even if there weren’t any mistakes, there will still be many parts where the quality could be improved through proofreading. A translator must carefully proofread his/her own work with the mindset of thoroughly taking responsibility for his/her translation. In so doing, the quality of your translation can improve dramatically.

However, when translators like myself whose native language isn’t English proofreads in English, they suffer unique difficulties that other native speakers of English do not. This is obviously because English isn’t their native language. Translators are probably the only people subject to this kind of unique situation. This e-course was specifically designed to help those people. This course provides information and advice in many ways to help translators satisfy their clients and final readers by drastically improving the quality of their translation through the process of proofreading, which is located at the last step of the translator’s work process.

Who Will Benefit From This Course

Any and all freelance translators whose native language isn’t English that want to improve the quality of their English translation through effective proofreading. Lesson 1 and lesson 3 of this e-course provides general tips for proofreading that can be applied to any language pair. However, lesson 2 applies only to proofreading for work translated from your native language into English. Because English isn’t my native language, I created lesson 2 in collaboration with 3 other translators who are native English speakers (two Korean to English translators and one French to English translator) and it provides an easy, simple, and practical checklist for translators whose native language isn’t English.

Estimated Duration of Time Needed to Take This Course: 2~3 hours

Course Table of Contents

Lesson 1: Proofreading Is a Necessity, Not an Option

1. What Is Proofreading?
2. The Position of Proofreading in the Translation Process
3. Things to Check Before Starting Proofreading
4. While Proofreading

Lesson 2: Checklist of Linguistic Aspects 

1. Be clear and concise
2. Avoid passive voice whenever possible
3. Make sure you’ve used articles correctly
4. Check your pronouns
5. Check your commas
6. Use modifiers carefully
7. Be consistent with name systems
8. American vs British English
9. Avoid using conjunctions at the beginning of a sentence
10. Capitalization of titles

Lesson 3: Checklist of Non-Linguistic Aspects

1. Reading the Client’s Instructions Again
2. Checking the Format
3. Changing the File Name
4. File Delivery Method

Course Preview

You may view the following lesson without purchasing the course:
Lesson 1: Proofreading Is a Necessity, Not an Option