The language services industry is brimming with professionals who, as a whole, form a truly precise and specialized production network. With regards to the life cycle of a translation project, clients will be directly or indirectly assisted by a group of people, where every professional fulfills a specific role. We all know that prior to the creation of a purchase order, sales representatives are involved in the communication with translation clients. These salespeople are responsible for advertising the agencies’ services (in the case of freelance professionals, they are in charge of this task) and putting these agencies in contact with said clients and their requirements. Next, at an internal level, we must highlight the crucial task of the account and project management departments, as they are responsible for presenting and establishing the business relationship’s terms and conditions (rates, liabilities, deadlines, protocols for action under certain circumstances, etc.), advising clients on the language services that are best suited to their localisation requirements, organising each project’s flow within the agency’s production mechanism, and acting as liaison between said clients and the translators or the company itself during the period of time the assignment is in progress and also during the post-sales period since, as we know, the lifespan of a translation continues beyond its delivery, as the client may require amendments or updated versions require editing. Last, but not least, the production department assigns every project to professional translators. The profile of these professionals is highly variable because, even though we call them translators, they are usually qualified to perform multiple tasks related to the adaptation of source materials into the target language and to the performance of a quality control of the translated deliverables. From an objective point of view, this is the group of professionals that assumes the responsibility for the message being correctly reproduced in the target language. In order to do that, they must make terminology, syntactic, grammatical and cultural decisions that successfully bridge the distance between that which is originally expressed in a source language and what is going to be transmitted in the target language. For this reason, the translator’s profile has been diversified into a series of “secondary” profiles which, given the nature and importance of the work they do, have now become truly independent occupations that add individual value to the translation supply chain and form part of an organised sequence to guarantee the highest quality of the final product.
Specifically, this translator profile is diversified into the figures of the translator, reviewer and proofreader. As we all know, the translator is responsible for performing the most obvious link of the translational process, consisting of expressing in the target language that which has been first expressed in the source language. In order to achieve this, translators are expected to have specialized knowledge in the area they are translating, in addition to a series of skills that are specific to their work such as terminology accuracy and consistency as well as proficient language use. However, this industry is well aware of the fact that the human factor, when added to the concept of a cognitively-intensive task with highly competitive deadlines, may give rise to mistakes. It is in this context where the need for the reviewer role emerged, in order to take up the translator’s work (which must be thorougly checked by the same translator before delivery in order to have as few errors as possible) and then, performing a comparative reading between the translated version and the source copy to verify once again that both form and message in the target language are correct. Many professionals in the sector tend to consider that the same translator profile is in charge of both translation and reviewing stages. But they’re wrong. However, the guidelines dictating quality criteria with regards to translation activity establish that each of those tasks must be performed by a different professional, simply stated, because four eyes see better than two. This stems from the fact that when translators are already familiar with the text, their ability to spot mistakes won’t be the same as for the professional who is checking it from scratch. Once we get used to the content, it is easy to overlook many issues. For this reason, the reviewer figure stands out as an essential profile in the language service industry.
Nevertheless, the terms “reviewer” and “review” tend to be misinterpreted as “proofreading” and “proofreader” in the translation sector. The reason behind this mix-up is that conventional wisdom understands reviewing and proofreading as two tasks with a similar purpose: checking the material and detecting the presence of errors to subsequently amend them. However, even though it fulfills the same purposes, the role of the proofreader differs with regards to the execution process and the level of intervention on the part of the professional. In fact, the basic difference with respect to the reviewer lies in the fact that the proofreader performs a single language reading, in other words, they only read the translated version, not including the source, because this professional’s task is to ensure that the text can be perfectly understood and sounds natural to the target audience and in which grammar and spelling are correct.
Although these same tasks are also performed by the translator and the reviewer in their respective stages, as we mentioned earlier, the cognitive nature and the human factor in translation lead to the possibility of making mistakes, for which reason many clients opt for a comprehensive quality control that includes the engagement of the three profiles with their three levels of checking, in order to have a top quality deliverable.
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