Morals of a professional edit - For non-native speakers

 

Hey there, traveler!

Some of you may have been wondering about the utter radio silence for the past weeks. Well, a few things contributed to that – lack of ideas, late-autumn low mood and a bit of buzz about our WIP. As you might have seen on Twitter, we got around to have a professional edit Shackles of the Storm, an oh boy, was it not an experience! So much so that I decided to write a little something about it, if any of you are still waiting for this step. 

First of all, a round of applause: our editor did a fantastic job. She was thorough, she went into details and she didn’t pull her punches when that was needed. To top it, she did it with a pinch of sarcastic humor that made us laugh many times (on our own incompetence). Her work is even more impressive when you consider how many things she needed to fix, and to do that, I’m going to publicly humiliate myself by sharing our most prevalent flaws. Okay, maybe I won’t humiliate myself, but I think if you learn what we fucked up, maybe you will avoid it in the future! (Holy shit, I’m drafting dangerously close to giving actual writing advices… Woe the hypocrite.)

The base of most flaws: translation.

We’ve said it many times before, but if you missed it, here it is again: neither of us are native English speakers. We’re from Hungary, Central Europe, and as such, we’ve done our reading mostly in Hungarian, even wrote Shackles of the Storm and its sequel in our native tongue. (As a fun fact, if you’re interested, here’s an excerpt in Hungarian: link). The fact is, Hungary has around 9 million people, and maybe a couple million more who speak the language living elsewhere, and that’s considering all age groups. You can’t really make a living as a writer with that narrow of a potential reader base, so we did the next logical step: we started translating our book to English. Since translation costs around 3500 dollars (yeah, you’ve counted the zeros correctly), we decided if we want to make this happen, we need to learn how to translate the story ourselves. 

We didn’t start out from rock bottom, we were already communicative in English and did most of our studying in English, but to translate an entire book, intended for readers… it was different, to say the least. My method was the following:

1. Since ain’t nobody got time for translating a book sentence by sentence by hand, I used the built-in word translator as a base to work with. Later I regret this decision, and I’m thinking about just biting the bullet and doing it by hand for the sequel, but that’s another discussion for another day.

2. The text came out half-English, half-gibberish, so I downloaded the free version of Grammarly and using that as a guideline, I started combing the text so at least it was somewhat coherent and understandable.

3. Since that was still unpleasant to read, I hit up ProWritingAid. This was the most inconvenient part, since (being the cheap bastard I am) I had to use the free browser version, which only allowed me to work with the first 500 words (I think), and only if I copy-pasted it into the online textbox. So what I did was I pasted a chapter, edited the first 500 words and when I noticed ProWritingAid stopped giving me tips, I just cut that part and pasted it into a word document. As you can tell, it was arduous as hell so I recommend you use a premium version, if you can allow it. But if you can’t, it’s still possible, only it will kill your soul.

What’s the Achilles heel in all this? One simple assumption I foolishly made - that books in English sound the same as they do in Hungarian, only… you know… English. I was proven wrong.

As our editor pointed out, cultural expectations are different from place to place, and even time changes them. What we found the hardest to come to terms with was the English language’s lack of dialogue tag. In hungarian it is considered pleasant to read if there are colorful and well worded tags abundant in your text, and they are mostly necessary to completely portray emotions. In English, this task falls on the verbs. If you use strong verbs no extra fluff is needed, if you don’t, no amount of fluff will save you. If the reader can’t guess by the character’s dialogue what they feel while they say it, you done goofed. And we done goofed, many a time.

Another flaw we couldn’t shake was due to our past with roleplay forums. While writing an RP post, it is common practice to lay out as much detail as possible, so your partner can work with it, react to the world and add something to it in a similar fashion. That means insignificant world-building details, overly-described (and usually named) characters who appear for a page or two, and constantly putting emotions into words. The fact is, readers aren’t RP partners, they don’t want to form your world and add to it, they aren’t waiting for details they can build on later, they just want to read about it. Who would have guessed, right? But what’s the harm, you may ask. Well, this over-description of every insignificant thing reduced our should-have-been gutpunching, dramatic ending into “just a thing that happens”, which totally destroyed it.

So, to wrap up this overly long, borderline writing advice post, what’s the take home message? First, work on your dialogue and weed your extra tags. 90% of the time, your tag could be morphed into the dialogue with a better word choice, so in those cases when you feel that tag is really necessary, try and integrate it into the words. Second, spare the reader of details that are just there, even if they are interesting, find a plot point where you can show them off. And don’t name every minor character. 

What can you do to avoid or correct these mistakes (other than trusting your editor, of course)? The same thing we are doing now - and you can consider this and advert - getting some english speaking beta readers. Yeah, we also thought we're done with that step already, but these are the rules of this game. So, if you're interested in reading a post-professional edit version of Shackles of the Storm and willing to give us feedback on a chapter by chapter basis, don't hesitate to hit us up here, or on Twitter, even Facebook! We can even trade manuscripts, and since we're a pair, it's a two for one deal. Don't miss out!

Cheers,

Dar