- You visualize in your mind the sentences you hear, that is, literally, you see in writing what you hear: initial capitalization, periods, commas, accents, etc.
- After seeing everything in item 1 (a process that takes about as long as it takes to blink), you would be perfectly able to suggest at least two or three changes to your partner so that what he said “sounds more natural.”
- In your family, everyone is afraid to speak because they don’t want to listen to you go on and on about “lay” and “lie” and their correct usages.
- When viewing a film with subtitles, you identify to perfection where all translation errors (which you have certainly not missed any) and you mention them to any person still willing to watch a movie with you with the consequent result that they then blame you for missing the plot of the film to hear your criticism.
- You do not understand how people do not have grammar sites in their RSS feeds.
- You have the habit of missing the product of an advertisement because you cannot concentrate due to how horribly the message is expressed.
- You see dangling participles and they literally hurt your eyes; your ears are in pain when you hear them.
- You regularly lament the loss of the English subjunctive.
- As soon as someone comes to tell you something new (an advertisement, a lost child, a story that someone told him, the origin of a word, etc.), the first thing you do is go to the Internet is to search for at least three reliable sources that support the story (with all that that implies: medium, author, publication date, etc.) to finally believe in the veracity of the story.
- You are asked to edit a text for, say, Australia, and you take half a day to triple check the agencies of the country as well as any linguistic peculiarities, according to preference and frequency of use that you verify over and over and over…
- Food or sleep are secondary. You have to meet deadlines!
- You cannot live without your dictionaries of idioms, prepositions and the like. And as if that were not enough, you often find that you have strong arguments against the proposed term.
- With a glance at the text to edit, you immediately think of at least three ways of saying the same thing better.
- Always, regardless of how well it is done the basic translation, you know you could have left the text to be a candidate for a Pulitzer if not for … there is not enough time (as always) to list that and, of course, this category does not exist yet.
(Versión en español: https://www.trustedtranslations.com/sabes-que-eres-editor-cuando-2011-06-01.html)
