Text correction or language correction is popular in Scandinavia, where there is a very high standard of spoken English within the general population and especially in the business and academic worlds. Most companies and organisations tend to employ native Scandinavian translators, and it is also very common to expect authors to produce English versions of their own texts. This is the case, for example, even for professional scientists, although it hardly seems fair to expect them to be bilingual in a foreign language as well as having spent many years studying for higher degrees in their specialised fields! The result is often a mixture of high school English enriched with a lot of long words lifted from the technical literature, which itself is very likely not to have been written by a native English speaker in the first place. As a result, a sort of jargon-ridden sub-species of English develops, parts of which may only be comprehensible to a speaker of the author's own native language, and from which all subtleties have been lost or muddled. More commercial organisations, on the other hand, seem to rely heavily on phrases they have picked up from American films and TV programmes; the effect is often not what they intend. See some examples on our 'what to avoid' page!

Then somebody realises that their company is not presenting a professional face to the world with its translations, or that an academic paper risks not being accepted for publication in British, American or Canadian journals, and the text is sent out for language correction. The expectation is often that there may be just a few spelling mistakes or other minor details to clear up, while the reality is usually that there are whole segments which are ambiguous, unclear or incomprehensible, due to the author being forced to write at a language register much higher than that which s/he has ever been taught.

The translator then has to make sense of this garbled text, with the disadvantage that even a dictionary will be of no help, as the text is already in his or her native language, supposedly! The only way forward is by a combination of intelligent guesswork and ongoing dialogue with the original author, to ensure that the intended meanings are actually being represented. A common trap here is that of 'false friends' - words and phrases which are equivalent in both languages, but which have different meanings.

Language correction, then, is full of pitfalls, and with a high level text and anything less than outstanding written English skills on the author's side, it is almost always quicker and cheaper in the long run to commission a translation from the foreign language in the first place.

However.... if your text is already written in English, and you don't have an orginal language version, send me a representative sample of 100-500 words and I will tell you what is wrong with it - and give you an estimate for putting it right!