The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 14 - Chapter Aft

Translator’s Notes – The Apothecary Diaries Vol. 14

The Proof Is in the...Proofing

Throughout these notes, we’ve examined a lot of the stages a book like this goes through as it makes its way to you, the reader. We’ve talked about the initial research into background and vocabulary, the kinds of choices about structure and tone that have to be made while creating the actual translation, and the editing process, where the translator and editor collaborate to make the draft as strong as it can be.

However, that’s not the end of the line! Like any book that gets published, a volume of The Apothecary Diaries has to go through proofreading before it can go out into the world. This is a chance to add a final coat of polish to the manuscript before it’s officially released.

So what is proofreading? During this stage, a person called a proofreader (natch) reviews the entire manuscript and looks for typos, punctuation errors, grammar issues, and similar fundamental elements. They also make sure the book is consistent in terms of its style—in the case of a company like J-Novel Club, this means making sure that the book abides by the house style.

It’s worth pausing a moment to understand the difference among grammar, usage, and style. 

Grammar is the basic structure of a language. It’s why word order in a sentence in English—take “dog bites man” and “man bites dog,” for example—makes such a huge difference. If there’s a grammar problem, the text may communicate the wrong thing, or, in extreme cases, may not communicate anything at all. 

Usage is just that: how words are used. If you’ve ever seen an expression in a book and thought, I don’t think we say that in English or I don’t think that word means what the author thinks it means, you’ve questioned usage. 

One issue is that usage can vary by region. A classic example is American (i.e., United States) English versus British English—a character in a British book might shine his torch toward a lorry, but the same character in the US would shine a flashlight toward a semitruck. However, usage can also vary widely within a single nation or group of speakers of a language. Sasha and I live in different parts of the US, and at times one of us will suggest an expression to which the other can only respond, “What does that mean?” We both speak American English...but it’s not quite the same language.

Usage can be malleable; with the advent of the internet, in particular, many speakers are much more exposed to the regionalisms of other areas than they would have been several decades ago. However, there’s always a question of what kinds of vocabulary or expressions readers can be expected to recognize, and when it’s acceptable to use a regional expression or term. This is partly something the translator and editor will work out at the editing stage, but a proofreader can also query (that is, raise a question about) a given expression if they feel it may be an issue.

Style is about other matters that affect how the text looks and reads. Something like whether there should be one space after a period or two is a style matter. (Two was the norm when the translator and editor were first learning to write thirty-some years ago, for example, but one space has since come to be standard.) So is whether you put a comma before the last item on a list (“Maomao, Jinshi, and Suiren” versus “Maomao, Jinshi and Suiren”). Do you capitalize the first word after a colon? Do you spell out numbers (“one hundred” versus “100”), and which ones? Do you italicize words of foreign origin (“the kotatsu was such a pleasure on a winter day”)?

Questions like this can be answered by referring to an already existing style guide, such as the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS). Often, a publisher will nominate a particular style guide as their main source of reference, but will also have a list of exceptions or special cases that apply to the kind of material they publish—this is called the house style. A given series will also have a style sheet, which can include a list of its own stylistic exceptions, or of style questions that may not be common in general but come up frequently in that series. We use the style sheet for The Apothecary Diaries, for example, to remind ourselves that we use lady-in-waiting, not lady in waiting, that honorifics are translated (rather than retained as such), and that guest room is two words—among other things.

A proofreader will examine the text from all of these angles during their readthrough. Proofreading is one of the very last things that happens to a book before it goes out the door, so changes at this stage tend to be minor. In addition to the considerations above, a proofreader may make suggestions here and there to clarify the text, but at this stage there won’t be wholesale changes to character voice, the structure of the text, and so on. 

At J-Novel Club, the translation team then reviews the proofreader’s changes and can decide to approve or stet (editor-speak for rejecting) them. J-Novel is unique in that the unproofed draft is released for public consumption—these are the “prepubs” published on the website—and readers are invited to comment on it. Hence, at this stage, the translation team also takes into account any salient errors spotted by our eagle-eyed readers! It’s also a good chance to see how the entire book fits together, because, with the translation complete, it’s the first opportunity to see the entire text at once.

The book (again, at least at J-Novel) goes through two proofreading passes, each handled by a different proofer, with the translation team reviewing changes after each pass. Then the book is finalized, and the final epub file is created. The proofreading phase is thus the last stage at which it’s relatively straightforward to make changes. If any mistakes are noticed later on, the matter has to be handled by a dedicated team that revises finished files and releases updated versions to digital publishers, making it trickier to implement changes later than to catch them at this stage.

You can see, then, why having plenty of pairs of eyes on the text before it’s finalized would be a good thing. Proofreaders’ work isn’t always talked about much, but their contributions are invaluable to producing a finished product that’s as clean and polished as possible. We here on the Apothecary Diaries localization team are grateful for the time they put into reading each volume. Thanks, guys!

Until next time, read widely, and have fun!