This paper presents a study of the professional revisions performed on six books –three fiction works and three non-fiction (historical accounts)– translated from English into Spanish. The revisers’ tasks included copy-editing and stylistic editing as well as translation revision (Mossop 2007; Mossop 2008; Robert 2008). Our approach focuses on the divergences between a translation draft and the text’s final version amended by professional revisers prior to publishing. Our study sheds light on the intersection between the descriptive approach in translation product-oriented research and the prescriptive view of quality in the context of the editorial industry. For each revision file, 200 revisions were sampled from two book chapters. We classified all interventions. Since revisers deal with many levels of text composition simultaneously, revisions were categorised according to the language description level affected and according to the translation qualities that were improved by the revision. Our analysis confirms the influence of the revisers’ tasks on the effects of translation laws (Toury 1995), as their focus is on curbing the effects of interference in translation and thus maximizing idiomaticity. Readability is also a concern for revisers, particularly in non-fiction, which highlights the relevance of the genre variable (fiction vs non-fiction).

The research reported in this study has been funded by the Spanish government (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, MINECO) through project “Evaluation in Translation” (ValTrad, FFI2013-42751-P).