Providing high-quality translation involves teamwork! Thorough revision and proofreading are inherent components of the overall production process for translation companies worth their salt. However, in this regard, it is often difficult to quantify the time and effort spent by your editor on revising the translated text and, as a consequence, fairly to assess the extent and value of their input. The work required of your editor or proofreader can vary dramatically depending on the quality of the original translation. For this reason, fixed rate remuneration may represent a method of payment that can seem far from fair, meaning that many linguists are not happy to accept revision or proofreading jobs to be paid on a per-word basis.

One possible solution would be to pay revision jobs on an hourly rate, but in this case it can be difficult to be sure that the time declared by an outsourced linguist has really been spent on the task. Here at Alba Translating Company we are proud to present a piece of software that may help you to find a way around this issue.

Here in Alba Translating Company we are proud to present a piece of software that may help you to find a way out of this. Editor’s Little Helper is a tool that helps your editor to record the exact time spent on any individual file and to create a report that can be sent to the project manager. As well as recording the actual time spent on the revision the report also indicates the “revision depth” (ratio of the number of keyboard strokes made during editing to the total number of characters in the text). This can provide your client with a useful measure of the true quality of the original translation.

The application also has another useful feature – making a list of errors during the revision process. Your editor can copy any text fragment containing an error to the clipboard, then apply the SHIFT+ALT+E shortcut, and the copied text will be added to the list form automatically. This form includes standard fields (source text, target text, corrected text, plus check-boxes for error type and severity, and error recurrence) in addition to providing the option for the editor to add further notes. The error list can be edited at any point during the document revision, or, subsequently, as an exported MS Excel file. After completion of work with the revised document the list of errors is included in the report generated by the program .

We have been using Editor’s Little Helper at Alba Translating Company for quite some time, and are now happy to make it available for everyone. You can download it free of charge. Any feedback, bug reports or feature requests can be sent to chief_editor@alba-nn.ru and will be greatly appreciated.

Download Editor’s Little Helper

Download Editor’s Little Helper Application User Guide

Editor’s Little Helper: Frequently Asked Questions