Ad Lagendijk
5 October 2013
Using professional editing services
Tags: better English, non-native speakerPosted in Getting published
Communicating in a language that is not your mother tongue is a handicap. For Germans and Dutch people speaking and writing acceptable English can be achieved after a few years of school. For people from Japan or from China this is a nightmare. But scientists from these countries have to do it if they want to have their papers published in leading journals.
If an author would like to have the language, style and/or grammar of his manuscript improved he could ask a colleague to help him. If he is lucky one of his coauthors could help him out. Or worse, just for this reason he could ask somebody to become a coauthor. Manuscripts with spelling errors or other mistakes are readily rejected by scientific journals. How could these scientists being helped? Is there another solution?
An interesting question is how useful it would be for scientists to use a professional service for checking and correcting their manuscripts. I thought about this after I had a few my Twitter tweets translated, within an hour, in Chinese and in Turkish for a very reasonable prize.
Commercial Editing Services
After some searching on the internet I found that there is such a commercial service. It is called Enago, English Editing Service. Perhaps some of our readers have already used it. We are very eager to learn about your experience. Or hear about your opinion on using such a service. Perhaps there are other editing services around that you have used. Or that you know off. Please tell us.
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6 Oct 2013 11:30, Zhenyu Ye
Some publishers also provide language editing service, but I have no idea how good they are.
Elsevier:
http://webshop.elsevier.com/languageediting/
Nature:
https://languageediting.nature.com/
IEEE partners with SPi for editing service:
http://www.prof-editing.com/
6 Oct 2013 19:46, Philip Chimento
Suggestion: hire a Master’s student from your surroundings who is a native speaker of English. They are cheaper than a professional editing service and will be glad of the chance to make a little extra money. (I speak from experience.)
The problem is making sure they have good enough grammar skills to do the job. For that, you might want to have them edit a practice document, and ask somebody whose judgment you trust to evaluate it.
8 Oct 2013 3:15, Jean-Luc Lebrun
Yes, you need both: a native English speaker AND someone with understanding in your field.
How do you evaluate whether the editing is good… that is another question: the original writer’s English may not be good enough to evaluate that. You then need an additional level of control – someone in the field with a good command of English who will review your paper for accuracy.
This said, as a trainer in scientific writing, I am often unable to edit because the text is ambiguous. Before I rewrite, I need the original writer to answer clarifying questions. It is an iterative process.
Editing is more than rewriting. It involves pruning unnecessary details, adding missing details, references, restoring text fluidity – and to do that, the editor/rewriter has to know the targeted readers! So all in all, it is quite difficult to edit well 🙂
9 Jan 2014 6:45, sarishti
If an editor recommends a language editing service (with which the publisher has partnership with- and it’s very expensive), can we go for some other publisher editing service like elsevier?
4 Feb 2014 17:24, Betsy Rack
Agreed, Jean-Luc. Editing is more than rewriting – it’s a hands-on process that requires a lot of back-and-forth contact with the author. A native English speaker and editor who understands what journals are looking for makes a big difference in preparing manuscripts for English-language journals.
I work at American Journal Experts (AJE.com), another professional service for academic editing, as well as translation, figures, and formatting (and a for-benefit company, meaning it’s not about profit).
I’m posting because this thread brought up qualities of scientific editing that are points of pride with AJE, and we’d love to be part of the conversation.
AJE has:
–Subject-expert editors who are researchers and native English speakers
–Partnerships with high-impact traditional and open access journals
–Pricing at different levels depending on what a researcher needs
–Company operations on a for-benefit basis
–Websites in four different languages for easy navigation (Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, and English)
American Journal Experts
You can check us out at http://www.aje.com. Please feel free to reach out with questions.
27 Feb 2014 9:16, Steven Eastwood
Nice article and great proofreading services.
9 May 2016 15:55, Peter Haigh
I wrote a blog article on what can be done to improve a document written in English by a non-native author.
The blog defines three stages: translation; heavy-editing; and copy-editing. The breakdown of what each of these stages involves is contained on the blog, alongside definitions of what editing, copy-editing, proof-editing and proofreading mean both in general, and when applied to academic work.
I do most of my work directly for academics who are publishing journal papers, but I also work via one of the larger editing agencies. I would suggest that you are better off dealing directly with an independent editor, as the agencies take about 100% commission, which means that the editor will have to work twice as fast to make their money. You get a better result, and a more personal service for less money by cutting out the middleman.
Of course, I am biased, and it might be that you cannot find an editor with your specialism directly, but I’d urge you to try first. I am an expert and published author in electrical engineering, but I can do a good job on editing any technical, scientific or numerical document. If you search for engineering proofreader then you can find me.
Contact me via my website.
Good luck with your search and getting published.
Pete
Peter Haigh
BA BEng MSc CEng MIET
07443 433327
http://www.technicaleditorial.com