Copy Jungle Blog

Have you ever read the mass email about being able to raed mispseleled wrods as lnog as the frsit and lsat lteetrs are in palce? The mind’s ability to construct meaning from such discombobulation is astounding, but it also places us copy editors in grave danger. With deadline bearing down, just imagine the ease with which the mind can breeze right over an aparent missing letter?

Spell check can go a long way to catch the missing letters, and with the amount of misspellings we see everyday I’m sure glad the technology was invented. Typos, however, are more cunning and can be difficult to catch in our dragnet. Thank goodness every eye at the paper is on the lookout for errant letters.

The other day we had a case in which a D went missing. A native Turkish speaker wrote an English sentence and gave it to a native English speaker to compile with many other English sentences written by various language speakers. The compilation was then copy edited by two other native English speakers. It wasn’t until the sentence was on the page, in the hands of another native Turkish speaker that the missing D was caught and returned to its rightful place in the word AND.

Even if it might pinch a copy editor’s pride, it’s nice when native Turkish speakers catch the culprits. The smile often on their face reveals the pleasure of usurping the copy jungle.  Our presence is a constant reminder for them that their English isn’t perfect and so we make sure to accept with dignity errors found and say thank you very much, good save. It’s like when a striker comes back to help the defense and finds himself in just the right position to head the ball out of the mouth of the goal.

More embarrassing (or humorous) was a jester of a letter that slipped through all our defensive ranks a while back. The subject of the article was Hadise’s music video that was to represent Turkey in this year’s Eurovision contest and if the version submitted was vetoed for its “eroticism.” The headline said: Turkey’s Eurovision video subject of dicussions. Yeah, no doubt dics are ussing over Hadise’s video. Have you seen it?

Missing letters are the bane of the copy desk but like every good sleuth, we always have our magnifying glass close at hand to examine each word. The mountain of text that flies past us everyday though means we can’t resist assistance from detectives on other beats if they have clues to help solve the curious case of the missing letter.

All of our reporters and translaters speak English as a second language. On the copy desk, we fully commend their hard work as they perform a difficult mental balancing act over the language barrier each day.

It is inevitable, however, that sometimes the langauges don’t mesh, some things simply aren’t translatable, and the writer reaches for a reference tool. Almost always said tool is helpful, but sometimes it likes to shake things up. Sometimes we just can’t help but laugh and so do the writers once we explain it to them. Still, some of our dictionary disasters should be catagorized as natural disasters and allocated emergency government funding.

The legendary case in point is Russian rubbers. No, it’s not condoms. No, erasers neither. Nope, not related to ‘rubbing one out.’ It was a story about hotels in southern Turkey with private hamams and the man in the story was complaining that these hotels were hiring ‘Russian rubbers’ and not staying true to the heritage of Turkey’s hamam culture. The word you’re looking for is masseuse.

More recently, we discovered vacation court. Any guesses? Yes, it is a court, but no it has nothing to do with vacation. The conversation went something like this…

“Vacation court?! What is that?”

“No idea. Better ask the writer.”

“Hi writer, please can you tell me what is vacation court?”

“The dictionary says it’s something like oncall court, like a doctor or pharmacy who you call in the middle of the night.”

“Hmm… like a night court? Like the TV series?”

“What series? Isn’t a night court like a midnight court of clandestine meetings to decide on executions?”

Back on the copy desk…

“I think we better just say court and clarify later that the court hearing was held in the middle of the night.”

The example here highlights a lesson learned quickly on multi-lingual copy desks like ours around the world – when in doubt, cut it out.

Finally our first real blog post.  From this platform, we plan to give a glimpse of the daily grind on our copy desk. 

Here we will discuss language quirk and translation troubles, stylepoints and story structures, and issues and controversies that face copy editors in Turkey and within its regionscape.

For starters, should we take an approach to copy editing on the web that is radically different than our approach to editing for the print edition?

My first impression is no.  We are still striving for quality in English grammar and spelling as we seek to optimize the words in the space, it’s just that the space is different.

In the paper, we are strictly physically confined by the edge of the page.  On the Internet, we risk succumbing to the luring call of the infinite space and just write and write and write.  The reality is, however, that Internet readers are short on time, patience and attention. For that, we need to cut down sentences and rachet up clarity so we can tell our stories easily.  The purpose of our work is upheld, but in this case we are strictly confined by time, not space.

Wadaya think? Make some noise.  This jungle ain’t empty.  We will hear your tree fall.

We have emerged from the steamy swamps to bring you this insider’s look into the Copy Jungle and the copy editing operations and goings on at the Daily News. Reader beware — It can get wild in here.