PROOFREADING ALMOST FINISHED: NATION
Proofreading as a career is "almost finished" according to Kurman Krishnan, Deputy Managing Editor of The Nation.
Kumar explains, in an article for the IDN In Depth News website, says The Nation has just a couple of proofreaders who are tasked with thoroughly checking the pages' printouts. Those pages also go through the paper's sub-editors;
"It would be physically demanding for a couple of guys to be reading through some 30 pages everyday. They mostly look for typographical mistakes in headlines, captions, font, style, intros and whatever else in their wisdom needs to be brought to the attention of the editors," explained Kumar.
Proofreading as a career "is almost finished", he conceded. Their role in the newsroom "has been diluted to a great extent in the sense they don't pore through every word of text" anymore.
I will agree with Kumar that proofreaders are a luxury, but only with the provision of experienced sub-editors than can pick up everything that a proofreader would have previously highlighted. Sometimes, though, that's just not possible.
4 comments:
Let's hope they find good proofreaders. The Nation's online articles are full of mistakes that sometimes make it difficult to read.
Well that explains it all. I've yet to pick up a copy of The Nation that hasn't been riddled with errors. Never mind the unedited copy that gets posted to their website.
Native English proofreaders, and proofreading from Thais with sufficiently good English skills costs money. At the moment there's no measurable benefit, in terms of revenue, for English language products in Thailand. It's still a niche market.
I am not disagreeing with what was written about. If you're going to do something you must do it right.
It's not just the English newspapers where proofreading is a luxury, the amount of Tinglish in otherwise professionally styled flyers, posters or even on the T-Shirts is quite high. And coming from a country with high wages most surprising to see were flyers where a poor dude had to glue the correction on top of the thousand copies manually.
And there's also the Thai-typical carelessness - we did a photo-book of our child in BKK and when it was done noticed that they misprinted the name on the cover. And not the difficult to spell German last name, but the rather short and simple first name. At least we got the book for a big discount then...
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