The curious case of co-pilot and editing

Artificial intelligence has certainly caused a stir in the world of language editing and translating. And there is no denying that it does our job fairly well. Fairly well.

Sometimes of course, fairly well is enough. But in my field of editing and translating, i.e., research, academic papers, doctoral theses, health-related and medical texts, fairly good English is not enough. Things simply can’t be expressed in an approximately correct way. Facts must be 100% correct, and there can be no risk that a writer’s meaning or assertion changes or is misunderstood due to a nuance caused by a slightly “off” choice of word or phrasing.

But can AI help someone write good academic English? A client of mine recently approached me with a task that would involve delving into this issue, and I was more than willing to do a bit of research into it!

“Write this more concisely in academic English”

This Finnish-speaking client had written parts of her doctoral thesis in English, and had then asked Co-pilot to “write this more concisely in academic English”. She wanted me to check what AI had done against her original version, which she felt needed a good deal of editing.

But before I begin to go into this, I’d like to share a few personal thoughts about language editing, as this task made me really think about it.

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This article was written by EASE member, Alice Lehtinen who set up her own language maintenance and translation service company, altexta in 2017. Alice is based in Finland and worked as an English editor for the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health for 11 years. Her duties included proofreading and translating from Finnish to English, as well as providing English language training on various topics to the organization’s employees. Enjoy!