Well, ok: I know what it feels like when you open a document on which you work as a reviser and you immediately spot mistakes, which makes you think the translator deliberately completed a sloppy job or he/she is not an expert of the field. So, you start feeling angry and being thinking “Why the project manager assigned this translation to him/her?” and “How did she/he dare take this in charge, as not capable of delivering a good work?”.

But I don’t think destroying someone else’s work will help you in any way. Here is a couple of values that, I think, should drive us when revising.

Pragmatism…

Since you find a mistake or two in a translation completed by someone else, you may start thinking the work should be redone entirely and that any of YOUR choices will necessarily be better. But you also have to admit that, unless the translation was evidently done by a charlatan, this person did work and he/she does not necessarily deserve to see his/her work ruined because of what went wrong. I think we should clear our mind after any sentence or segment corrected and try to be objective about every point.

… or maybe Humility

Because implementing your own choices in the whole document (even for style consistency reasons) will not necessarily make the final file better, as the client may have preferred the first version. And because taking your sharpest pen and butchering a translator’s work will not, in any way, make you a better professional. Some of the choices made by the translator may be correct or better to the client’s opinion. And, actually, thinking your solutions are fundamentally better is no good sign.

Teaching

It can be hard to know why you are revising a bad translation. Is this translator a crook? Did this person have the time to work correctly? Is he/she an expert? Is he/she experienced or a rookie? Did he/she have a terrible day? Obviously, if the work lets you think the answer to the first of these questions is “yes”, I understand you let off steam. Still, I think we should be careful about why a translation can be under our own standards.

One can fuck up. But one can learn. So, if you are an experienced translator and you are revising the work of someone who struggled, be kind. Be lenient. It could have been you. Or it could be you in the future. I think one’s main goal should be to correct what is wrong (and only what is wrong) and help such translator to improve.

I am telling you this because it happened to me. And, certainly, it happened to many of us. On both sides of the reviser’s pen. I sometimes was the kind of reviser I just depicted: the one who tends to think that his solutions prevail on those of the others, like a young politician, maybe a bit too sure of his views (even narrow-minded, some would say). And, like I said, this does not make you someone better, you just tend to be the kind of guy who needs to pull the other downwards to feel better. Which is totally counterproductive, in the end.



This is the conclusion to which I wanted to bring you. Editing “without mercy” can also merely mine the collaboration of a translator with a client (typically, an agency). And mining a colleague is mining yourself. Weakening the business relationship of a translator will lead the other linguist to accept things (especially rates) that he/she wouldn’t have regularly accepted. Then, in the overall, it lowers the translators’ compensation and working conditions. Which means YOURS TOO. Shooting a colleague’s work down in flames is actually shooting a bullet in your own foot.

Translate without fear, of course. But be fair. Be humble. Be lenient. Be the reviser with which you would like to work to improve.