Pre-edition, as we have seen in other posts, may include several procedures: a text can be pre-edited both from the point of view of the format as well as the text itself and any of its typographical errors.
The handling of the format in all its forms: tables, images, text boxes, tables of contents, headers and footers, etc., is usually referred to as pre-edition. All these components of a file from a previous conversion needed to be looked over before the automatic pre-translation process. It is essential that all formatting problems be corrected so that the processing is as transparent as possible.
Furthermore, one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome is the problems of pre-editing text. There are cases in which the conversion of files (usually conversions of poor quality scanned PDFs) is so bad that it is not only necessary to fix the formatting of tables and charts, but it is also necessary to do important work of pre-editing the text to correct any linguistic errors: spelling errors, incomplete sentences, sentences cut in half, whole sentences that appear in text boxes and that require rewriting, grammatical errors, etc.
This work can be time consuming. Normally an editor is the ideal person to carry out this linguistic pre-edition. However, in some cases the PM can take care of this step. Of course, this can be done only to the extent that it does not demand much time, because if it is a task that takes hours, it is going to take away time from the management of other projects. Everything depends on the conversion rate and the amount of linguistic arrangements that must be done.
It is imporant then to know that a pre-editing may include fixing format, as mentioned earlier in this post, but it also can be a linguistic overhaul. In terms of quality, linguistic pre-editing is much more important than the pre-editing of format that can directly affect the quality of pre-translation. If the source text is incomprehensible, then the automatic translation will be as well. This does not happen, for example, if the layout format is wrong.
(Versión es español: https://www.trustedtranslations.com/preedicion-linguistica-2012-02-17.html)
