There is no way around employing proofreading and editorial services wherever the written word is used. We agree that today's autocorrect applications reliably clean up the majority of spelling, syntax and punctuation errors, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) platforms can produce or translate entire ready-to-use articles. However, much written material that goes into circulation is somehow “off” – missing information, contradictory, unclear, lacking references – and may be annoying or unintentionally amusing to its target audience instead of informative and persuasive.

• In proofreading we take care of all basic flaws your copy may still have. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, numbers, dates, etc. all undergo our rigorous proofreading process. In addition, we make use of our more than 25 years’ experience working with every type of copy imaginable in order to accurately identify and eliminate any inconsistencies and contradictions.
• In editing we go deeper, examining copy that, even after proofreading, still leaves something to be desired. It may be that the style doesn’t always seem to match the writer’s intentions. It may be that there is something wrong with the internal structure and the way the arguments are laid out. It may be that there are redundancies. In short, we make sure your copy behaves in accordance with its original purpose and its target audience’s requirements.
• The term editing also describes something entirely different: namely, the process of creating something new out of a collection of existing written materials. An in-house newspaper, for example, or a company brochure, press kit or product catalogue. Even an entire website. Whatever the assignment and purpose, we will edit your copy to perfection, using our extensive know-how acquired over more than a decade working at magazine editorial offices and advertising agencies.
• Pre-editing refers to the process where copy is prepared or optimized for machine translation. This involves proofreading, editing and checking for any structural flaws. The better the original text fed into the AI translation platform, the better the final machine translation. It's the best of both worlds, combining the efficiency of Artificial Intelligence on the one hand with human experience, expertise and intuition on the other. The human element really comes into play where there are flaws inherent in the copy. Flaws that AI fails to detect.
• Post-editing means editing and proofreading manually, and applying human intelligence and expertise to any copy after it has been AI-generated (e.g. ChatGPT) or AI-translated (e.g. DeepL). This is necessary more often than one might expect, because machine-written or machine-translated copy is rarely flawless. To find examples, simply visit the multi-lingual product pages of online retailers, or read the newsletters that flood your inbox. Such copy is not only distributed automatically worldwide, but very often it is also translated automatically. Anyone with a sense of quality, however, will agree that post-editing is indispensable when dealing with AI copy. Also, there are areas where there is simply no tolerance for errors, for instance in legal translation.
• AI training is another field where the human intellect can assist AI in generating and translating copy. This is because copy transformers and translation platforms need good copy if they are to improve. After all, what they do is basically collect copy from the Internet, analyze it and put it back together. In so doing, they still find it difficult to distinguish good copy from bad. This is where human language professionals come in, extracting perfect copy from their own rich archives, preparing it and making it available as AI training data.