Step 6: Proofreading

You want your marketing materials and publications to be picture-perfect in order to draw in your audience. Therefore, Oregon Translation strongly encourages a final proofreading step for all projects involving Graphic Design, as well as in certain other cases. In the proofreading stage, a new translator reviews your final proof with a fine-tooth comb to check details like word placement, hyphenation, punctuation, diacritics, and capitalization.

Although grammar rules are properly followed in the plain text translation provided to the graphic designer, occasional flaws may be interjected when transferring the foreign language text into a graphic layout like InDesign or HTML. Even graphic designers having long experience working with foreign languages may not know every variant grammar rule for every single language. Occasionally phrases are placed in the wrong location in the design layout, despite all efforts by the translator & editor to make corresponding words between the original and translation readily apparent to the designer. For all these reasons, we use a native writer of the target language to check closely proofread for such details.


Common flaws found by our proofreaders:

• Versioning: The original document was modified after we began translating a first version. Translation needs to be updated to correspond to the new source document.
• Capitalization: Spanish rules for capitalizing headings tell us to capitalize the first letter of the first word in the title; leave all other words in lower case (aside from proper nouns). In English, we capitalize all key words in the title.
  
• Diacritics: When writing French for a European audience, it is common to omit the accent marks on capital letters. This is not acceptable practice in Canada.
• Hyphenation: English grammar rules encourage us to hyphenate words between double letters (ss, ll, rr, tt) when we reach the end of a line. Do not apply this rule when hyphenating Spanish. Historically, the Spanish pairs 'll' and 'rr' were individual letters in their own right, form a distinct phoneme from the single version 'l' and 'r', and must never be divided by hyphens.
• Punctuation + non-breaking spaces: European French inserts a non-breaking space between the word and many punctuation marks (!?; : French quotation marks). Be careful though, Canadians don't insert spaces in most of those same cases.
• Double Quotes or Single: When quotes are placed within quotes, American English places the single quotations on the inside and double quotations on the outside. British English does the opposite.

When there are so many variations on grammar rules even within three Western European languages, you can imagine how swiftly the process can be complicated when translations involve different alphabets or character sets (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Russian) and bidirectional languages that read from left-to-right AND right-to-left in the same sentence (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew). By performing a final proofreading, you can be assured that your final publication is indeed picture-perfect and ready to go to print.