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A pile of copies standing 500 meters tall has to be destroyed
Translators working on the Catalan version of Asterix made an error in their translation of the album’s title. The editor only noticed after the print run had been completed. They have all had to be binned: a total disaster.
Who is responsible for this, and who must pay for it? Don’t worry, no Eurologos office was involved in this catastrophe!
Even if the error can only be attributed – in this case – to the translator (or the translation agency), the ensuing financial consequences do not, however, automatically fall upon the person who made the error.
The difference between responsibility for the translation and for editing: the case of the atomic bomb
In order for the translator at fault to be held financially responsible for damages incurred by their error, their translation contract would also need to be inclusive of that for editing.
Indeed, a translator cannot be asked to pay for the damage incurred by a nuclear blast caused by the error they made in translating two words written on the bomb’s control panel: “yes” instead of “no”.
This hyperbole serves to show the fundamental difference between translating and editing. It is the responsibility of the editor to consider the consequences of a possible translation error. Given the enormity of the potential consequences – with regard to the translation’s use and the risks carried –, the editor is the only person to be held to account, and they must check the translation ten times over to ensure that it has been completed correctly, e.g., without any inversions.
The editor could legally issue the translator with a credit note for costs up to the full 100% of the bill. But no more.
Without a specific “zero-error editing” contract, the translation contract cannot include the immeasurable risks of a service that – to take the hyperbolic example of the atom bomb once again – will be charged for less that one euro!
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Failing to implement a “zero-error editing” contract can prove very costly
The translation process is always prone to error: the translator may commit at least 50 errors per line, even after having translated, superbly, a few hundred kilometers of text. Experience is not always a guarantee. You can always become hypnotized by a word, a semantic meaning, spelling, etc.
And the reviser can also fall prey to the same mania, thereby concealing the “blindingly obvious” mistake.
C’est pour cela que l’éditeur est souvent nécessaire. Et c’est pour cela que « l’éditing zéro défaut » exige un contrat particulier
où des contrôles multiples et croisés sont prévus systématiquement. Les maisons d’édition connaissent ce problème crucial et les plus
prestigieuses arrivent même à quatorze contrôles du texte avant le « bon à tirer ».
This is why an editor is often necessary. And this is also why “zero-error editing” requires a special contract, where repeated checking and cross-checking are systematically inscribed. Publishing houses are aware of this primary issue, and the most prestigious among them carry out as many as 14 checks on the text before it is deemed “OK for print”.
Many advertising agencies call upon Eurologos offices to carry out “naïve” proofreading of their texts, from both an orthosyntactic and terminological point of view. Their departments actually wrote the texts and re-read them dozens of times, up to the point where they were rendered psychologically saturated by them. And thus blinded by detail.
Those clients who craftily try to cut corners by improperly combining translation and editing will always get their comeuppance.
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