Recently, I was translating dates on a birth certificate for client, and I completely missed that I had put the wrong date. I just totally wrote the wrong thing, for example it said 10th of Jan but I write 1st of October or 3rd of March or something like that.
It happens – that’s why we need reviewers for all work – being careful isn’t enough, but I still don’t like that I did that. Sometimes, no matter how many times we check it, mistakes do slip through.
I know the style guide and rules inside out, but for me, mistakes like that I refer to as “slips”. It’s like a written “slip of the tongue”. If we were given a longer timeframe between the translation and review process, I bet that would reduce the occurence rate, but we are where we are.
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. I did a few tests and it only took me a couple of extra minutes.
Some reviewers are really good at spotting things like that and nothing seems to get past 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.