Less a rant, more a matter of principle

It's funny how many people in Estonia seem to think they know more about my mother tongue than I do. It's something I first noticed with intractable students arguing the toss about matters in which they had absolutely no ground to stand on, but which has become much more marked since I took up translating full-time two and a half years ago. I had yet another run-in with self-styled 'English experts' yesterday.

At the risk of sounding as conceited as the people I am complaining about, let me just tell all these 'experts' something: as a native speaker of English, former teacher, occasional author, long-time proofreader and editor and full-time translator, I do in fact know more than them about my mother tongue. And it's not even the ones who require specific (technical/medical/scientific/legal et al) terminology who are the whingers and know-it-alls; they're usually the most amenable. It's people who say "oh, I would translate it myself, but I just don't have time". It's people who think that studying English philology for a few years means they know the language as if it were their own. It's people who try to pass off their impoverished writing skills as the fault of the translator. And so on.

If you give me a text specifically because you feel it requires the skills a native speaker translator can bring to it - one who understands Estonian well enough to be able to work in all of the nuances - and then take the finished article - which has been translated, proofread, edited and reviewed - and decide you know better, introducing 'improvements' that in fact constitute blatant errors of grammar, word choice, sentence structure and punctuation, why bother to come to me in the first place?

Of course, the text is yours to do with as you please. But the service I provide is a professional one like any other; you wouldn't undergo brain surgery and then come home and start fiddling with it yourself, would you, even if you were in your final year of medicine. Why should the principle be any different when it comes to translation?