Proofreading

Does “it don’t matter” really not matter?

Proof­reading can be more than a lin­guis­tic re­view.

Usual­ly, proof­read­ing means that your text is go­ing to be ex­am­ined for its lin­guis­tic ac­cu­ra­cy. But what ex­act­ly does such an exa­mi­na­tion in­clude? If you think that a lin­guis­tic re­view should con­tain the ex­ami­na­tion of lin­guis­tic as­pects such as spell­ing, gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion you won half the bat­tle. A proof­reader also checks if, for ex­am­ple, used word pairs are ar­ranged prop­er­ly in the gi­ven lan­guage. Lin­guists call this col­lo­ca­tion. To­day, peo­ple say and write it don’t matter more and more fre­quent­ly, either think­ing it is cor­rect or be­lieving that it does not matter since it is very com­mon­ly used in the English speak­ing world. But does it re­al­ly not matter what we say or read? Us­ing it don’t matter is very col­lo­qui­al and may be used in speech or for ar­tis­tic pur­poses such as in song lyr­ics or po­et­ry or in lit­er­a­ture and movies for cer­tain char­ac­ters. In gram­mat­i­cal terms – un­less we are us­ing ir­reg­u­lar verbs – when­ever writing in pre­sent tense and in third per­son, us­ing pro­nouns like he, she or it, we have to add an s to the end of the verb fol­low­ing the third per­son (he, she, it). Or would you say “he do not care”? Cer­tain­ly not! So, why use “it do not matter” in­stead of “it does not matter”?

In ad­di­tion to check­ing spell­ing, gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion, a proof­reader al­so ex­amines whe­ther the text is com­pre­hen­si­ble. When proof­read­ing a text, the lin­guist checks if the us­ed terms, phra­ses and words ac­tu­al­ly say what the au­thor means to say (se­man­tics), and if word pairs are co­herent (col­lo­ca­tion). There are dif­fer­ent types of proof­read­ing ser­vi­ces, which one is the right one for you?

ÜDiAL of­fers proof­read­ing, edit­ing and re­vi­sion of other trans­lations.

Find out more here.