Lack of Proofreading Costs Organisation $80 Mil USD

The moment you publish any text related to your organization or business, all eyes fall on you. The audience begins to consider your credibility and legitimacy with every word they read. Clearly, your brand equity faces its toughest test here. In fact, a very well-known organisation even made an $80 Million USD mistake for not proofreading. Don’t let that lack of proofreading cause you expensive mistakes.

An $80 Million USD Mistake

Is it true that a one-character typo in your document can cost you millions? In 1962, the Mariner 1, a NASA Space Probe with the mission of collecting scientific data, exploded soon after liftoff all due to a missing hyphen in the code changing its trajectory entirely. Thankfully, this mission was unmanned.

The Weaknesses in Spellcheckers

And what if you wrote the document in a language with which you are not familiar? While word processors may have spellcheckers to catch some common mistakes, it does not resolve problems such as homophones (ie. to, two, and too), misplaced commas which can change the meaning you intended to convey, or even unnecessary quotation marks that can unintendedly depict sarcasm (Cafe “Frank”). Is this a real cafe or is the coffee called “Frank”?

How Can I Maintain my Brand’s Credibility?

You’ve invested a lot of effort into your brand by carefully using the right visuals and texts. Let us take you the rest of the way there when you start to publish for an international market. As an optional add-on, Taia can conduct a final review of your translated content before you present it to your audience.

In English language documents, we scrutinize every sentence for parallelism, pronoun-reference agreement, appropriate verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, and run-on ideas. We know how important it is that your business’ reputation remains untarnished!

Always on the Hunt for Typos

No matter the target language family group, we at Taia check the potentially problematic areas of:

Syntax – passive voice, narrator focus, repetition of words, inversion of the natural order of speech
Grammar – aspectuality, and temporality in which the verb tenses are checked for best-fit with relation to how described events unfold.
Rhetoric – reproducing figures of thought such as metaphors, oxymorons, paradox, comparisons, and diction in an accurate way.
Pragmatic – decision to use formal or personal informal pronouns in specific languages, as well as idioms, irony, and humour.
Culture – for the display of dates and other regionalized ways of describing information.
Lexical-Semantic – for the consideration of terminology best befitting your document’s purpose.

Our goal is to make your written content suitable for the target audience following the principle of the five Cs: correct, consistent, clear, concise, and complete.

For those incredibly important documents such as contracts and memorandums, reviewing and proofreading is important for peace of mind. For what it’s worth, proofreading ensures your business shines, no matter the target country or market.