I realise that I have an unusual fascination with reptiles and therefore have amassed an equally unusual repository of trivia and esoterica about them. But I'm frequently baffled by things like that little remark in Raskin's book. Of course, he was a computer UI expert and not a herpetologist*, but surely that's the sort of thing an editor would catch? Books still had editors in 2000.

In my frame of reference, it's "common knowledge" that chameleons are the ones with the independently moving eyes, and geckos are the ones that walk on walls.

Am I grossly overestimating common knowledge?

*) I am also not a herpetologist.

@datarama

Most editors don’t do fact checking, they’re checking for readability and correct spelling / grammar. My first book was about seven years later and the copyeditor printed out the PDF and annotated it with proof-reading marks for me to get back. There were technical reviewers but they were experts in the book’s subject matter. If I made a throw-away remark on a different topic, they wouldn’t correct it unless they happened to know it was nonsense.

Remember that this predated Wikipedia. Fact checking would have meant going and finding a book about reptiles. Unless you have some reason to believe the comment is false, you definitely wouldn’t bother, and even then you might not.

@coder @datarama

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).

@coder @datarama

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.