There’s a popular saying about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers— she did everything he did, but backwards and in high heels. Translation editors are a lot like Ginger Rogers, in that they need to both read the source text and check it against the translation. That is what they do in an honest, transparent editorial and proofing process in which a client or agency supplies the editor the source text.
I was bemused the first time an agency asked me to proof a translation without giving me the source text. They expected me to perform much like Johnny Carson’s Karnak the Magnificent, who would supply an answer without ever having been asked the question. They wanted me to back-translate the text, which I was glad to do, although it is not a productive measure. Checking a text by back-translation is not like checking one’s subtraction or addition. Languages don’t work like these simple mathematical operations. Much like living things, languages are complex, varied and often surprising.
It also was perplexing when an agency wanted me to proof a translation and tell them if it had been translated correctly but would not supply the English source text. Their reason? They just wanted me to tell them if it was all correct Tagalog, conveniently forgetting that the translator may not have understood the English but could have rendered a Tagalog sentence quite nicely – which would have made the mistranslation invisible to me as a proof reader.
Then there was one client who gave me both the source and target texts, and was pleased with my rate but was startled when I informed her that it takes longer to proof a translation than it does for the writers of the original to proof their work. After a pregnant, confused silence on the other end of the phone, I realized that it had never occurred to her that translation editors have to read both documents when proofing a translation. Editing is indeed a time-consuming process because it requires toggling back and forth between at least two main documents, (sometimes supporting documents come into play), and both main texts frequently require a thorough dissection.