Discourse and text level

Transediting

Re-edit a poorly written source while translating it, by prior agreement. Also called Translational editing or translation and editing.

Reference/All techniques

Optional Text Stetting (1989) Chesterman (1997, Pr9)

What it is

Transediting is the radical re-editing of a source text in the course of translating it. Passages are rewritten rather than rendered, duplicated material is consolidated, defective structure is repaired, and the target text is the one the source ought to have been. The translator is doing two jobs, and the second is editorial.

Karen Stetting coined the term in 1989 for the grey area between editing and translating, arguing that the two activities meet in practice far more often than the tidy division of labour admits. Chesterman adopts the term from her and lists the operation as Pr9, at the far end of the scale from the strategies that adjust wording. His account of what it involves is short and blunt: drastic reordering, rewriting, and tidying up.

The boundary against coherence change is the practical one. A coherence change relocates material the source already contains, leaving the sentences essentially as they were. Transediting composes. Once the translator is deciding what the text should say and supplying the connections it failed to make, the target has ceased to be a rendering of the source. Partial translation shares the territory from the other side: it removes without rewriting, where transediting rewrites what it keeps.

When it applies

  • The commissioner has bought a usable target text rather than a faithful one, and has said so.
  • The source was drafted outside its author's own language or under time pressure, and its defects are of drafting rather than of substance.
  • The genre treats the source as raw material by convention: news copy prepared for another market, corporate communications, internal documentation.
  • The content will be re-used, so structure and consistency matter more than correspondence with a particular source version.

Examples

DE>EN

  • Source: A maintenance manual in which the safety instructions appear in three places in three different wordings, and two part numbers conflict.
  • Target: A manual with one consolidated safety section, the numbering conflict resolved after a query to the client, and the procedure renumbered.
  • Comment: Rewriting the safety text is what makes this transediting rather than coherence change. Note the query: the technical conflict was resolved by the client, which keeps the substance where it belongs.

TR>EN

  • Source: A press release opening with two paragraphs of institutional history and reaching its announcement in the fourth paragraph.
  • Target: A release opening with the announcement, with the history reduced to one sentence of background.
  • Comment: The target genre has a fixed shape and an editor at the receiving end who will otherwise impose it. Transediting is what the commissioner is buying here, and describing the work as translation would misstate it.

NL>EN

  • Source: A policy document with overlapping sections, inconsistent defined terms and no summary.
  • Target: A document with the terms harmonized to a single set, the overlapping sections merged and a summary supplied.
  • Comment: Harmonizing defined terms is the point at which caution is required. Inconsistent terminology in a policy document sometimes reflects unresolved disagreement between its authors, and unifying it can settle a question that was deliberately left open.

Watch out for

Transediting is a commissioned service and not a translator's prerogative. The decision that a source is badly written, and the authority to correct it, belong to whoever owns the content. A translator who transedits without a mandate has supplied something other than what was ordered, and the result being better than a faithful rendering does not settle the question.

In certified, sworn and evidential work the strategy is unavailable without exception. The target is offered as a rendering of a specific document, defects included. An improved version of a defective original is not a translation of it.

  • Agree the scope in writing before starting, and agree who resolves factual and technical conflicts. That is normally not the translator.
  • Keep a record of what was changed. Transedited text cannot be checked against the source in the usual way, and a reviser who is not told will report the divergences as errors.
  • Tidying prose repeatedly turns out to have resolved an ambiguity, dropped a qualification or hardened a hedge. Where the defects look substantive rather than stylistic, stop and query: rewriting around a contradiction conceals it.

References

  • Stetting, K. (1989). "Transediting: A New Term for Coping with the Grey Area between Editing and Translating." In G. Caie et al. (eds), Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, pp. 371–382.
  • Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Benjamins Translation Library 22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 4. Revised edition (2016), Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.

Expectations this technique adjusts to

For the entries below the expectation sets a direction and not an endpoint. This technique makes the adjustment, and the entry says what the evidence for the direction is and what that evidence does not establish.

Target genre expectations

Related entries

Coherence change Information change Partial translation

Translation that can be checked

Every Translyta delivery comes with a quality report and a terminology report, so the decisions described here are visible to your reviser instead of buried in the text.

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