During this month, we have been exploring the editing process and how important each step is to translation quality. Once your nonprofit team begins to translate more challenging documents and books, it is important to add the step of stylistic revision. This is the secret to a high-quality translation.
The main responsibility of a stylistic reviser is ensuring Readability: making sure the translation is pleasant to read for native speakers of that language. This does not always add an extra step to the process.
For example, if you use a translator who is a native speaker of the original language, you probably don’t need a bilingual reviser. The translator has already done the work of making sure the original document was properly understood. The translation can be handed off directly to a stylistic reviser, then to the formatter/proofreader. The stylistic reviser may need extra time to work on a translation done by such a translator, but eliminating bilingual revision time will even things out.
It is best if your stylistic reviser is bilingual, so they can look at the original document if there is something that does not make sense in the translation. If this is not possible, you might need to have an interpreter available to resolve issues like this. However, the main requirement of your stylistic reviser is to be a native speaker of the language you are translating into, and to have excellent writing skills
Within The King’s Translators, sometimes we hire a professional translator to do stylistic revision of our books, especially academic books. This occurs after someone on our team has translated the book and a bilingual revision has been done. This has helped to accelerate our process and guarantee high quality. While we must raise funds to pay the professional, we are still not spending anywhere near as much as we would if we hired a professional to do the translation from the beginning.
If you are going to have your team translate permanent promotional materials including websites, I recommend having these reviewed by as many people as possible, definitely by the whole team. These documents are usually short, so this should not take a lot of extra time. But because of their impact on your organization’s reputation, you need to make sure these materials are conveying the right message.
Next month, we’ll plunge into another important topic for your nonprofit translation team. Stay tuned!
Have a great day!
Liane 🙂
