Proofreading/Review: Are there any industry standard categories/types of errors?

[evdoxia]

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How can we establish industry standard categories of errors, if we haven't managed yet to separate "editing" from "proofreading" and "copy-editing" from "review" :-)

As far as I know there some basic categories/types of errors. The names of these categories change, depending on the persons involved in the process. For example, some proofreaders refer to "terminology" errors while others, who do not have any theoretical background in translation, refer to "vocabulary" errors. In both cases however, the problem is the choice of words. For some of us, "stylistic" corrections are equal to "preferential" corrections. Needless to say that some reviewers believe that "register" is identical to "style". Even though I've been taught to distinguish the types of errors in the following basic categories, I still haven't been able to conclude whether these are the basic ones or not. And this is mainly due to clients, who introduce their own categories each time, such readability errors, naturalness errors, structure errors and so on.

Basic categories of errors

1) Accuracy (in relation to the ST)
2) Grammar/Syntax
3) Punctuation
4) Spelling
5) Terminology/Vocabulary
6) Style/Register
7) Format/Layout
8) Consistency/Coherence
9) Content
10) Reference (in relation to any reference material provided)

It would be nice if we could read some of your thoughts about this topic.
TIA

[Vion]

Hi Evdoxia,

My first reaction is that your numbers 1 - 4 are the most tangible and easiest to consider as standard.
After that, there are variations and differing opinions which cloud things more ...isn't 'terminology' also a specialised subset of 'vocabulary'? 'Register' I understand to mean local 'sociolinguistic' usage of language, whereas 'style' usually implies 'writing style' - but is used in too many different aspects and I've also seen it (ab)used to refer to 'format' (e.g . 'MLA style' / 'SLA style' ;-) so even if something is industry standard, this doesn't necessarily mean that it's correct.
-just some first thoughts...