@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.

@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.

@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.