I have a dear friend of mine who is a freelance editor, she does wonderful work. If you ever need someone to turn your work into utter brilliance, you should give her a call. You should not, however, send her your book if a) English is your fifth language and b) you sent your manuscript through an online translator to turn it into English.
This morning she emailed me a snippet of a book with a simple line in her email that read: “Read this and tell me what you think. It makes me want to claw my eyes out.”
So I read it, she was right. Hideous and poorly translated, it was not only impossible to edit, but in need of a complete rewrite.
One of the sentences read: He walked into the room to and then he blanked the door.
????
I did not know that you could blank a door, or for that matter, use an online translator for an entire manuscript. Clearly, you can’t.
The moral of the story is this: While there are many things to be found online, one of them isn’t translation.
