Tina Vonhof wrote:
When you say " I could even give a perfect grade in the report when in reality the translation is full of errors and the agency wouldn't know a thing about it", I hope you don't mean that. That would be unprofessional and dishonest and you would not be doing anyone a favor.
Write an accurate report but when you are reviewing the article, make sure you don't correct every little thing. A reviewer is not an editor, i.e., it's not your job to make the text the best it can be. Some things can be left as they are if they are an adequate rendition of the source text that is understandable in the target language, even though there may be a better way to say it.
Giles Watson wrote:
Aditya Ikhsan Prasiddha wrote:
I could just omit the errors in the review report, I could even give a perfect grade in the report when in reality the translation is full of errors and the agency wouldn't know a thing about it
... you wouldn't, would you?
Noooo, of course not. In fact, I wrote a pretty accurate report, with benefits of the doubt used as much as possible. And no preferential change was reported, I even omitted very minor errors. But that still made me uncomfortable as there were still many errors which could make my colleague look bad.
Orrin Cummins wrote:
If I was an agency, and a reviewer came to me and told me they had a conflict of interest like this, I wouldn't want them to review that particular translation. There would be no way to really trust the objectivity of the review.
So I think if you told them they would understand. There was no way that you could have known who the translator was before they sent you the job, right?
As long as a lot of time hasn't already passed since they first sent you the job...
Actually I already finished the review, hence why I made this thread. There might be more batches coming and I think I will resign from the reviewer position for reasons stated by the wonderful Proz members above.