Finding the gold test stone

Live editors can find the gold test stone. Right now, LLM AI can’t.

Much of my time as a scientific editor and proofreader has focused on authors who speak English as a subsequent language.* Given that the people who hire proofreaders are usually the ones who need them, I often find myself looking at a strange or colorful turn of phrase that needs something closer to translation.

I was working for GenScript as a W2 employee and I didn’t mind occasionally helping out other parties when my boss handed me their copy. At the bottom of one page, the text assured the reader that this technique was the gold test stone in the industry.

“Gold test stone”? What’s “gold test stone,” I wondered. There were plenty of plausible explanations. It could have been industry jargon. My boss and many of his friends were Chinese. What if it was a Mandarin idiom, and what would be the best way to modify it for an English-speaking audience?

The right answer came to me at once. Gold standard. The drafter had been trying to say “gold standard.” Mentally, I experienced it as a leap, like the one Barbara McClintock described when she first visualized the jumper gene. My connection may not have been Nobel-worthy, but I’ve had to do it over and over, and it’s become a skill.

My fellow editors, please comment with your own gold test stone. When did you have to intuit the client’s meaning, and how did you confirm that you were right?

*I don’t want to say “English as a second language” because sometimes it is third or fourth. I have worked with some smart cookies.