It is a common fallacy that proofreading is the same as editing. The term proofreading is sometimes used to refer to editing, and vice versa. Although there is necessarily some overlap, particularly regarding queries, proofreaders typically lack any real editorial or managerial authority: their only available course of action is to raise queries with typesetters, editors, or authors. 

As a result, proofreading and editing are fundamentally separate responsibilities because creativity and critical thinking – by their very nature – conflict with the strict copy-following discipline that commercial, technical and governmental proofreading requires.

On the other hand, Alphatrad Worldwide can help you in carrying out both the proofreading and the editing service flawlessly and efficiently: if you either need to check the spelling, grammar and accuracy of a piece of text, proofread a translated article against an original source-language version or the work of an expert editor to spot factual errors and improve the formatting, style and correctness of your text. 

We can also create a tailored style guide and glossary allowing you to establish your stylistic rules and outline the approved terminology, which can later be leveraged and referred to for any future jobs.

What we can do for you

• Our professional, domain-expert proofreaders and editors will help you to optimise the quality of your translated texts into over 100 languages.
• Your documents will be checked for general issues regarding spelling, punctuation, grammar, terminology, jargon, and semantics; or we can keep to your specific instructions if you need our proofreaders and editors to look out for known issues.
• Our proofreaders and editors will also review the written text on your technical topic, identifying usage errors and ensuring adherence to your style guide and will check your documents against a glossary or terminology database, if you have one. Otherwise, we will create them for you.
• The correction of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, mistyping, incorrect punctuation, inconsistencies in usage, poorly structured sentences, wrong scientific terms, wrong units and dimensions, inconsistency in significant figures, technical ambivalence, technical disambiguation, statements conflicting with general scientific knowledge, correction of synopsis, content, index, headings and subheadings, correcting data and chart presentation in a research paper or report can be made directly in the document, or we will use change-tracking tools, comments, mark-up or annotations, depending on your instructions.

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