Services I provide
I specialise in languages services connected with English, and have been working in this field since 2005.
I specialise in languages services connected with English, and have been working in this field since 2005.
I have been working freelance as an English language editor since 2005, when I was also teaching English at the University of Montenegro. Since 2010 I have been full-time in (non-teaching) English language services, which include: written translation, pre-print proofreading, voiceover work and transcription of audio and video files. My academic background is in engineering, but I also studied Russian language for 10 years. After working as a computer programmer for four years, I moved to the Balkans and learned Serbian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Bosnian and have been based in Nikšić, Montenegro, since 2005.
Qualifications
Work experience
Editing is often referred to as "proofreading", but in this context is the correction of texts, usually in a word-processing program, such as Microsoft Word, whereby grammatical, typographical, spelling and other mistakes are eradicated, and the text, which is often written by a non-native speaker of English or is translated from e.g. Montenegrin into English by a non-native English speaker, is brought up to a professional level and sounds like it has been produced by a native speaker. English is used as an international language, and a professional text is important for conveying information in an efficient and effective way, because the quality of a text is often seen to reflect the professionalism of an organisation or company.
I edit texts in a variety of different formats, most usually in Word or OpenOffice documents, where the changes can be easily seen because of the change tracking option. I also correct LaTeX files, usually used in the academic world. The types of texts that I most often work with are:
Occasionally, I have worked on novels, short stories and poetry.
My standard charge for editing work is €7 per page (where a page is defined as 1,800 characters of text including spaces), which is calculated on the final edited version.
Proofreading differs from editing in that it relates to files that are ready for printing, but need a last check to remove any errors that have crept in after the editing process, typographical errors relating to justification, fonts, headings, positioning of graphics, etc. These are usually in PDF format, and corrections are made as comments in the margin rather than to the actual text on the page. It is good practice for the proofreader to be a different person than the editor.
My price for proofreading is an hourly charge of €40. I will usually give an estimate of the time required for a pre-print document.
One might think that with the advent of machine translation tools, internet-based translation engines and AI machine-learning algorithms, that the work of a translator is superfluous. However, this is not yet the case, especially in source languages that are not used universally, such as Serbian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Bosnian. The raw texts produced by ChatGPT, Google Translate and other machine-based or AI-based translators are still prone to errors, inappropriate approximations of translation and unnatural-sounding sentences, which often require more effort to identify and correct (i.e. retranslate) than a human producing a translation him/herself.
Also, something which is common to all online tools as far as I am aware, is that the original text is sent to a database which trains the engine. Any text which needs to be kept confidential should not be submitted to such machines. While computer-based tools can be useful if used in the right way, they certainly have not yet made human translation redundant, and any text which is more complex may be significantly "changed" by an AI machine so as to change the meaning in the target language.
My usual advice to Montenegrins who ask me for translations is to find a local good translator who will offer a better price, then engage me to edit the English translation at the price shown above under "editing". My standard price for translation is €20 per page (where a page is defined as 1,800 characters of text including spaces), which is calculated based on the original Montenegrin document.
While social media is dominated by video and audio formats, sometimes it is more useful to have this material in text form. I can produce English-language text files for subtitling, for use of people with hearing loss, or if the recording features fast or unclear speech. My standard rate is €40 per hour.
If you require an audio voice track to a corporate presentation or tourist publicity video, read by a (male) native speaker with a south-eastern British accent, let me edit and read your English text! Contact me for prices.
