Practical Issues of Translated Texts Editing

Abstract

This article contains a summary of some practical issues of translated texts editing with clear examples. Copy editing of translated texts is different from copy editing of texts written in the native language, because the focus of the work shifts from how to deliver an author’s message in the most appropriate way to how to deliver author’s text, written in the native language, in another language (Ukrainian) in the most appropriate way. The first question is the versatility: does the copy editor need to know the language of the original text in order to do effective copy editing. And she/he should at least understand the basic features of the language of the original text such as phonetics, grammar and syntax. Also a copy editor should pay particular attention to such aspects as: at the lexical level – false friends, transliteration of proper nouns, excess of possessive pronouns, translation or adaptation of lexical gaps; at the syntactic level – copulative verb, word order in a sentence, contrastive stress in a phrase, address words, syntax simplification. A necessary aspect is the unification of certain elements in the translated text: address words, units of measurement (length, weight, area, time, volume, etc.), transliterated proper and common nouns. Described in this article principles of transliteration, unification, adaptation, lexical and syntactic aspects of copy editing of translated texts will help to improve the quality of translated books into Ukrainian.