Why The Magic Pen? When you create a blog one of the first things you need to strategically think about is the name you are going to use. Among my wide variety of super creative options, I considered Editor Girl, The Magic Pen Edits, On the Perks of Being an Editor, and so on. After coming up with what I thought was a whole set of utterly brilliant ideas, I started browsing the web, comfortably sitting on my year-old swivel chair—my back so needed her!—and thinking that probably no results would come out for any of them, that I was quite safe from ever being acused of plagiarism or anything of the sort.
Well, turns out Editor Girl had been coined earlier: and she’s a character, an incredibly interesting comic character, some sort of super heroine whose main power consists of editing her enemies’ bubbles so that she can hear them say exactly what they ought to say! If only we professional editors could do that, we would make hundreds of thousands a year! Fascinated by my random find, I read a bit more about this character and learnt that in order to have her powers do their trick, she uses a magic pen. Wow, that was quite a coincidence, I thought, as the term “magic pen” had been an important cluster in my life even before I bumped into this Editor Girl story.
As it happens, one of Silvina Ocampo's short stories in Spanish is entitled “La pluma mágica”, which literally translates into “The Magic Pen.” “Why not?” I asked myself. Plus, I already have Ocampo’s short story translated into English and I could post it in my new blog as some sort of welcoming story…
So, that more or less accounts for my choice, I guess? From a more *Istic* perspective, I also like to think an editor’s eye sort of works in magic pen mode, given all the high demands and great expectations that are often posed on them both from clients and themselves.
What does ERP stand for in your blog? Editing, Reviewing, Proof-reading. It might have been “REP” or “PRE”, but in a way “REP” seems to echo “REC”, as if “recording” and starting with the rhotic didn’t make me feel much at ease, nor did I like it for my readers. As for “PRE”, it seems to imply some sort of previous stage to something, which would have diverted readers from what this blog is all about and also from what editing actually consists of. So that leaves ERP as the most likely-to-sound-OK acronym for the thrism.
What does TEP stand for? The process of performing Translation, Editing and Proof-reading.
What does QA stand for? Quality Assurance. This is rather an umbrella term encompassing a wide scope of tasks related to making sure a final product (in this case, a previously translated/written text) is free of mistakes, free of inaccuracies and grammar errors while it closely matches source text in looks and general format, meeting the client and/or end-user’s standards and expectations. Part of the job done by a QA Freelancer involves completing general ERP tasks, but there are other types of client-specific work they may do as well, such as scorecarding third parties’ edited work, creating style guides, comparing source vs. target layout and others.
What does LQA and LSO stand for? LQA may stand for Language Quality Assurance or Linguistic Quality Assurance. It often involves the procedure of comparing and contrasting source and target while checking for different error categories which are usually the same, only that their names vary depending on the linguist, the agency if you work with any, and other factors. These error categories usually are: Accuracy, Terminology, Grammar, Style, Target Language Variety and Formatting. Another name for LQA is the gerund scorecarding derived from the term “scorecard”, which is a more or less standard template that is generally used to check for the above mentioned issues and where mistakes are graded according to their level of severity into minor, major, critical and preferential.
The LSO acronym is more specific to formatting checks and it stands for Linguistic Sign-Off. Once a text has been both translated and edited, it is likely that it will have to undergo a DTP (Desktop publishing) phase through which the ‘raw’ file is converted into the original file format provided by the client, whether it be a PDF, a PowerPoint file or any other. During an LSO, the linguist performing the task will often have to check that target text layout and general format (bolding, italisation, capitalisation, font size, numbers, table of contents, images, etc.) matches content and layout in source text. Also, this is the chance to re-check that the final target text is free of any possible instances of spelling mistakes, typos, double blanks, wrong measurement conversions, missing passages or text left in source language.
Well, turns out Editor Girl had been coined earlier: and she’s a character, an incredibly interesting comic character, some sort of super heroine whose main power consists of editing her enemies’ bubbles so that she can hear them say exactly what they ought to say! If only we professional editors could do that, we would make hundreds of thousands a year! Fascinated by my random find, I read a bit more about this character and learnt that in order to have her powers do their trick, she uses a magic pen. Wow, that was quite a coincidence, I thought, as the term “magic pen” had been an important cluster in my life even before I bumped into this Editor Girl story.
As it happens, one of Silvina Ocampo's short stories in Spanish is entitled “La pluma mágica”, which literally translates into “The Magic Pen.” “Why not?” I asked myself. Plus, I already have Ocampo’s short story translated into English and I could post it in my new blog as some sort of welcoming story…
So, that more or less accounts for my choice, I guess? From a more *Istic* perspective, I also like to think an editor’s eye sort of works in magic pen mode, given all the high demands and great expectations that are often posed on them both from clients and themselves.
What does ERP stand for in your blog? Editing, Reviewing, Proof-reading. It might have been “REP” or “PRE”, but in a way “REP” seems to echo “REC”, as if “recording” and starting with the rhotic didn’t make me feel much at ease, nor did I like it for my readers. As for “PRE”, it seems to imply some sort of previous stage to something, which would have diverted readers from what this blog is all about and also from what editing actually consists of. So that leaves ERP as the most likely-to-sound-OK acronym for the thrism.
What does TEP stand for? The process of performing Translation, Editing and Proof-reading.
What does QA stand for? Quality Assurance. This is rather an umbrella term encompassing a wide scope of tasks related to making sure a final product (in this case, a previously translated/written text) is free of mistakes, free of inaccuracies and grammar errors while it closely matches source text in looks and general format, meeting the client and/or end-user’s standards and expectations. Part of the job done by a QA Freelancer involves completing general ERP tasks, but there are other types of client-specific work they may do as well, such as scorecarding third parties’ edited work, creating style guides, comparing source vs. target layout and others.
What does LQA and LSO stand for? LQA may stand for Language Quality Assurance or Linguistic Quality Assurance. It often involves the procedure of comparing and contrasting source and target while checking for different error categories which are usually the same, only that their names vary depending on the linguist, the agency if you work with any, and other factors. These error categories usually are: Accuracy, Terminology, Grammar, Style, Target Language Variety and Formatting. Another name for LQA is the gerund scorecarding derived from the term “scorecard”, which is a more or less standard template that is generally used to check for the above mentioned issues and where mistakes are graded according to their level of severity into minor, major, critical and preferential.
The LSO acronym is more specific to formatting checks and it stands for Linguistic Sign-Off. Once a text has been both translated and edited, it is likely that it will have to undergo a DTP (Desktop publishing) phase through which the ‘raw’ file is converted into the original file format provided by the client, whether it be a PDF, a PowerPoint file or any other. During an LSO, the linguist performing the task will often have to check that target text layout and general format (bolding, italisation, capitalisation, font size, numbers, table of contents, images, etc.) matches content and layout in source text. Also, this is the chance to re-check that the final target text is free of any possible instances of spelling mistakes, typos, double blanks, wrong measurement conversions, missing passages or text left in source language.