@david_chisnall @datarama I concur with David, although in my four short years doing technical writing, my editors were not technical at all, but they caught quite a few factual errors by... purely linguistic deduction! I always thought that was really awesome.
The best technical feedback I've ever had was from my Japanese translator. Unlike an LLM doing translation, he felt the need to understand the contents to provide clear, consistent, and idiomatic translations. As a result, he read the books far more thoroughly than anyone else and caught a bunch of small errors. If you read both English and Japanese, I'd recommend the Japanese versions of any of my books that have translations: they almost certainly have fewer errors.
But, even then, he was an expert in computing things, not in reptiles, so would probably have missed this specific case.
@david_chisnall @datarama I was unlucky; my writing was translated to my mother language, but a) I think they picked a cheap translation provider b) it was translated to an "averaged American Spanish", which feels foreign to me (as a mainland Spain speaker who avoids reading Spanish technical writing).
I think we had some translation process were authors participated, but I was never invited. I think I would not have been useful anyway.
@datarama @david_chisnall but your story adds to my belief that good translators are worth their weight in gold (edit: and horribly undervalued in the real world).
Edited 2h ago
They also did an Italian translation of one of mine. Apparently it was hilarious: technical terms translated as the word used for the same English word in non-technical contexts. They didn't send me any questions at all.
The Japanese translator sent me a bunch of clarification questions and reported several issues.
You could probably replace the Italian one with an LLM and do a slightly better job. There's no way you could replace the Japanese one.