An editor is your parachute, the person who catches you to prevent you from falling disastrously.
All of us make mistakes when writing. There are techniques you can use to identify your mistakes, but most of these require a bit of time (e.g. re-reading your work the next day) and you could possibly be working to a deadline so can’t wait until the next day. Or you may miss your mistakes because you read what you expect to see – after all, you did the writing so you know what was going through your mind at the time.
Good writing and translation agencies employ the principle of “4 eyes”. That is, they use one writer to do the initial work, then they use an editor to check the accuracy of what was written. These agencies recognise that we are all human, and it is part of the human condition to make errors.
An editor must see him / herself as a mentor and as enhancing the work of the writer. We can all re-write any sentence or paragraph: we can all paraphrase what someone else has written. To do this just to demonstrate that you can, is missing the point. An editor is not there to show off his skills: an editor is there to make the writing look better. So the editor looks for typos, spelling errors, and grammatical errors. Editing involves making the text more reader-friendly where necessary. Are the sentences jumbled into paragraphs that don’t flow well? Is there irritating and extraneous repetition? These are just a few of the aspects of a piece of writing that the editor needs to look for.
Constructive comments, explaining why certain changes to the text have been recommended, will help the writer to formulate his writing more effectively in future.
An editor’s job is important. It requires not only good language skills, but also insight into localisation so that the text is appropriate to the reading audience, and empathy with the writer who is, after all, only human!