CONTENT EDITING

Content editing is checking and amending a text for its ideas—what it says about the subject
matter. Content editing takes place both on the large scale (the macro-level) and the small scale
(the micro-level). We will be mostly concerned with those micro-level tasks which translators are
most commonly called upon to perform, namely the correction of factual, logical and
mathematical errors.

1) Macro-level Content Editing

Editors may suggest or require major changes in the coverage of a document’s topic. Major
additions or subtractions may be requested in order to make the text suitable for the audience, in
order to include the latest developments in the subject, or in order to distinguish a book from
others on the same topic. Sometimes major subtractions will be needed in order to make the text
fit the available space.

With some texts, macro-level content editing is closely tied to the social-gatekeeper function of
editors. That is, editors may be acting on behalf of an institution with an ideological purpose.
They may be employed to censor written materials before publication, by removing passages that
are ideologically unacceptable: governments for example may employ editors to reword texts
with a view to covering over unpleasant facts with euphemism or vagueness. Or editors may
simply reject submissions to the publication outright: newspapers of particular political
complexions come to mind in this connection.

Editors may engage in deliberate falsification on behalf of their employers. Falsification of

content also occurs during translation. Until the 1960s, translations of the Greek and Roman
classics regularly featured expurgation of sexual content—either prettification or outright
omission.

The ethical content editor has a professional commitment to truth. There are two aspects to this.
One is the avoidance of unintentional falsehoods. For this purpose, many publishing
organizations employ special fact-checkers. The second aspect is the avoidance of deception, by
ensuring that the published item tells ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Also, if there are
certain well-known objections to the author’s arguments, these are at least admitted, if not
answered.

It should be borne in mind that the selecting function of editors (accepting or rejecting whole
texts, or parts of texts) is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, the editor may select in order to
conceal truths (which may be deemed dangerous or simply offensive); on the other hand, the
selection may be made in the service of quality. Thus another characteristic of the ethical content
editor will be trustworthiness.

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2) Micro-level Content Editing

a) Factual Errors

One reason specialized texts need to be content-edited by subject-matter specialists is that others
may not recognize factual errors. But factual errors may also come up in otherwise unspecialized
texts.

Example:

In a plain-looking shop in the untouristy 19th arrondissement, a 1930 second edition of George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in dust jacket recently sold for $10.

This certainly is an unusual find, since the first edition of Orwell’s novel was not published until
1949. Factual errors also include more mundane things such as incorrect street addresses;
incorrect website addresses; not-quite-right book titles or names of organizations and incorrect
references (the quoted material was on page 406, not page 306 of vol. 3 no. 2 of the Journal of
Xology). If the translation is to be posted at a website, links should lead readers to a target-
language site, if possible and appropriate.

A final and very important type of fact that has to be checked is the accuracy of quotations. If the
source of a quotation cannot be tracked down, then the quotation marks should be removed, and
indirect speech used instead. If the quoted material was spoken rather than written, the quotation
does not normally need to be a verbatim transcript: hesitations (…um…) and false starts can be
cleaned up, and some publications replace professional jargon or dialect with more readily
understandable wordings.

- Conceptual Errors and Obscure Passages

Non-expert popularizers frequently make conceptual errors. Normally, people writing in their
own field of expertise do not make errors in field-specific concepts, though sometimes experts
writing for lay audiences do not express concepts as well as they might. Thus ‘greenhouse gases
absorb heat and then radiate it back to the Earth’ should perhaps be changed to ‘absorb heat
emitted by the Earth which would normally go into space, and then send it back to Earth’. Here
we see content editing overlapping with the audience-related concerns of stylistic editing.

Another common problem is passages where, as a result of poor writing, it is hard to see what the
author is trying to say. In some editing situations, the author may not be reachable for
clarification, and you must then decide on a course of action. Consider the word ‘restive’ in the
following sentence from the gardening column of a community newspaper, discussing
ornamental grasses:

“The varied colours and textures of their foliages and swaying flower spikes offer a colourful and
restive scene which can rival any field of golden wheat or waving green oats.”

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What has happened here? Does the writer think ‘restive’ means restful? Is there a misprint:
‘restive’ for ‘festive’? Perhaps the best thing would be to delete ‘and restive’.

b) Logical Errors

This category of error includes contradictions, nonsense, tautologies, impossible time sequences,
and confusions of cause and effect. Sometimes these errors can only be fixed by asking the author
what was meant. In other cases, you may be able to resolve the problem yourself.

Here’s an example of nonsense:

“The mother tongue of nearly 650,000 Canadians of English ethnic origin is English, and this
represents more than 10% of Canadians of French origin.”

The meaning is easily recovered from context: “The mother tongue of nearly 650,000 Canadians
of French ethnic origin is English”.

Tautologies are also quite common in careless writing:

“Parole supervisors give offenders instructions, monitor their behaviour, and give them assistance
and supervision.”

The final phrase tells us that one thing supervisors do is…supervise—an unnecessary statement.

Here’s an example of a contradictory time sequence:

“At a news conference today in San Francisco, IBM and Apple said they will disclose further
details about their plans for linking computers, creating new software and advancing computer
chip technology. The news conference will be held at the Fairmont Hotel.”

In the first sentence, it appears that the news conference has already occurred; in the second
sentence, the conference seems to be in the future. A little thought shows the problem can be
solved by placing a comma after the word ‘said’.

Once again, you need to be alert to notice the errors exemplified above. It’s very easy to skip past
them if your attention is not on meaning.

c) Mathematical Errors

Although in editing and translation, we are mainly concerned with language usage, in fact
mathematical issues arise in many texts which are not scientific, technical or financial.
Sometimes a mathematical error just arises from carelessness. For example, the decimal point is
in the wrong place, or the addition is wrong: 68% of the respondents to a survey were men and
42% were women!

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Very common are problems with percentages, measurement of time and place, life expectancy
figures, which you should be handled with maximum care.

3) Content Editing in Translation

During Translation

The factual, logical and mathematical errors discussed so far may be present in your source text
when you are translating. Unless instructed otherwise, you should correct logical and
mathematical errors in the translation and append a note to the client pointing them out so that
action can be taken to correct the source text if the client will be publishing the source along with
the translation.

Factual errors should be corrected if they seem to be unintentional or due to carelessness, but not
if they are important as indicators of the author’s ignorance of the facts. In the latter case, you
may want to indicate that the error is due to the author, not the translator.

Sample correction of a logical error: the source text has ‘we evaluated, analyzed and gathered the
data’; the temporal sequence here makes no sense, so mentally edit to ‘we gathered, analyzed and
evaluated the data’ before translating. Translators may have to subtract material from the source
text in order to make the translation fit into the available space. Sometimes it’s possible to avoid
this by typographical means, by eliminating redundancies in the translation, or by leaving
meaning implicit, but on other occasions actual eliminations of content may be required.
Translators may also need to make minor additions to explain, for example, geographical or
cultural features that may not be familiar to target readers; for example, change ‘the Rockies’ to
‘the Rocky Mountains’.

After Translation

Unfortunately, when translations of scientific and technical texts are published, the task of
content editing may be omitted. The source text may be sent for translation before content
editing, and then no one thinks to have the translation edited for content. Alternatively, if the
source text has been content edited before translation, it may be assumed that there is then no
need to content-edit the translation: it will automatically be correct. This assumption is wrong
since translators often do not have the relevant scientific/technical education and are prone to
inadvertently introducing factual or conceptual errors.

Where scientific editors do not know the source language, they should work with the translator so
that when they have queries about some point in the translation, the translator will be able to tell
them whether the query pertains to some feature of the source text or to the translator’s
interpretation. (Editors, like most people, tend to be somewhat naive about translation; they think
they are reading some sort of direct transcript of the source text, not realizing how much
transformation is involved.)