Preparing Your Document for Editing or Translation

Preparing Your Document for Editing or TranslationIn order to get started with ServingMed, you can simply contact us and send us the document you wish to have edited or translated. We will ask you if you know the journal to which you will to submit the article, and whether you prefer British or American English.

We usually work with Microsoft Office documents, but we can also work with PDFs, Open Office and HTML documents. However, there will be an additional charge for converting these documents to Word documents, depending on the documents’ quality and formatting needs.

For translation projects, it’s quite important that the document be entirely in Spanish. Some clients try to be helpful by translating phrases, parts, or sections of a document into English for us, but it actually impedes our ability to properly carry out the translation. This is because we use a computer-based translation tool to store all of our translations as we work, which allows us to provide consistent translations and improve over time, but the tool is confused by English values and statements.

Before offering a price and delivery date for editing projects, we will review your document to ensure the English is at a level that can be edited. We do this because the author’s level of English is sometimes insufficient for us to discern their meaning. In these cases, we need to translate the document from its original language. We have occasionally received Google-translated documents, which are also not sufficiently intelligible.

Our goal with both editing and translating is to produce a document that is indistinguishable from one written by a native English speaker. As long as our initial review shows that we can provide you with that service, we’ll offer you a fixed price and delivery date and begin work upon your approval.

If it’s our very first time working together, we will ask for a deposit (usually 20%) or a purchase order from the organization that will pay for the work. Once we’ve established a working relationship, those measures will not be necessary.