Recently, I was translating a birth certificate for client, and I completely missed that I had put the wrong date.
It happens – that’s why we need reviewers for all work, being careful isn’t enough, but I still don’t like to do that.
It got me thinking about a new workflow to help with dates, numbers, and names. In future, especially for handwritten documents done under a tight deadline, I’ll go through right at the end and manually write the dates, numbers and names from the Chinese document, then do the same from the English document, and then compare them. That should give an extra layer of protection.
Some reviewers are really good at spotting things like that and nothing seems to get passed them. I’m about average, but in this particular case the job was already very hard for various other reasons and it had taken me a lot of work to get the document done at all. So I’m not beating myself up, but I will try the new workflow in future, because errors in dates are not really acceptable to me.