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Do editors need editing? Do copywriters need copywriting? Should translators be translated? Anyone who works with texts — whether in proofreading, editing or translation — knows the answers.

But putting that conviction into practice when the text is your own is a different matter. In the time I have spent trying to be a writer — as I say myself, and as others say too, sometimes with a certain superiority, especially when they learn my book is self-published — I have had to learn to accept this all over again. In Poland above all. In Spain, the reception of self-publishing is different: I have the sense that it is not just accepted, but that it is beginning to be seen as a serious challenge to traditional publishers. I still do not know what to think. As so often, I find myself on both sides of the argument.

I have the training: a degree in philology, a master's in editing and writing, several courses and nearly two decades of experience working with texts. And still I consider myself a beginner. Because what I have seen over all those years is that there is no perfect text. There is always room to improve. Something always slips through: a double meaning in the original that does not survive translation, an idea you cannot quite express the way you want in your own writing. Time passes, you return to what you wrote, and you see it differently.

This is true for everyone: writers, translators, readers. You cannot step into the same river twice — I know it is a cliché, but it captures the idea well. And while we are at it: two pairs of eyes see more than one.

So I will keep learning and trying to express what is brewing in my head, alongside the ideas I have carried for a long time and the stories I have been wanting to tell. I learned perseverance when I started out in translation without having formally studied it: with humility, just as I try to approach writing now.

When people tell me that self-published books are not worth reading — no, they are wrong. To have arguments I started reading self-published books — by debut authors and seasoned self-publishers alike, in Spanish, which means from half the world: from Spain and countless countries across Latin America, and even the United States, where some authors have ten self-published titles to their name. I have been reading for two months at a pace I have not kept since childhood and adolescence. It is summer and I take every opportunity — at the beach, by the pool, during the midday heat of siesta. Something similar is happening in publishing to what happened in music years ago: anyone can start to exist online, and depending on their ability, originality, work and — yes — a little luck, they can become known beyond their immediate circle. This phenomenon in the music industry came to be known as the democratisation of music. I do not aim to be a bestseller. I aim to express what I think is worth telling, do it as well as I can, and yes, have other pairs of eyes review what I do.

So that the reader's eyes do not suffer from the errors in the text. And if they do suffer, let it be from the emotion it carries.

I had been sitting with Julian Tuwim's verses for years. Half-finished translations, notebooks full of annotations, versions I abandoned because something didn't sound right. Tuwim wrote with a Polish musicality that seems impossible to carry over: internal rhymes, wordplay, rhythms that Polish children have been reciting from memory for decades almost without trying. How do you make that work in Spanish?

My process had nothing digital about it. I printed, crossed out, rewrote by hand. I read each verse aloud, then again more slowly, counting the syllables on my fingers. If a finger was left hanging, the line didn't work. If I had to force a pause where there wasn't one, it didn't work either. The final test: could a child recite it without stumbling? Would they want to say it again?

Some verses were resolved in an afternoon. Others took weeks. La Locomotora, for instance, has a rhythm that mimics the clatter of a train, and finding that same effect in Spanish without it sounding forced was one of the longest challenges in the book.

My children were the first readers. Not the kindest, but the most useful. If they lost interest before the verse was finished, the fault was mine. If they asked me to read it again, that was a good sign. My husband brought a different kind of reading: more analytical, more demanding about natural-sounding Spanish. "That word is too obscure for a child." "A Spanish speaker wouldn't say it like that." Comments that stung a little and helped a lot.

One of the most concrete examples was the verb coger — perfectly natural in Spain, but problematic across much of Latin America. The goal was to make a book that worked for all Spanish speakers, so coger became agarrar throughout. Every decision like that was a small negotiation between musicality, meaning and the book's reach.

The six poems in the book are very different from one another in tone and rhythm. The question was whether the design should reflect that difference or whether a common graphic thread should give unity to the whole. In the end I chose to create a coherent style within each poem — with its own colours, its own illustrations — while keeping shared elements so the book breathed as a whole.

In that process I consulted with Mateusz, a graphic designer friend, whose outside eye was invaluable. He was the one who pointed out that some of my colour choices worked individually but clashed with each other. There was also the page numbering problem: something that seems like a minor technical detail turned into a genuine headache when the numbers didn't align with the illustration layout.

I ordered a physical proof copy before publishing. Made more changes. Then another round of revisions. And even so, when the book was finally ready to go, I found a couple of capital letters that had slipped through. Early in the process I had decided that every verse would start with a capital letter — a visual choice. Then I changed my mind: I would follow linguistic correctness rather than aesthetics. That meant reviewing hundreds of lines, and two of them, at some point, went unnoticed.

They are small errors. They are also a reminder that no book is perfect, and that perfection is not the goal. The goal is for a child to hear these verses, repeat them, make them their own. For Tuwim's magic to cross the language and arrive intact.

El canto de los versos Tuwim para los más pequeños is available on Amazon in paperback and hardcover. ↗ View on Amazon

Machine translation has been around for decades, but in recent years it has made a qualitative leap thanks to AI-based language models. Tools like DeepL, ChatGPT or the proprietary engines of major agencies now produce texts that, at first glance, may appear perfectly acceptable. This has changed the way many professional translators work — myself included.

Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) consists of reviewing and correcting machine-generated text to bring it up to the quality standard expected of a human translation. It is not a matter of skimming and signing off: it is professional work requiring deep knowledge of both languages, the subject matter and the appropriate style.

Post-editing is not proofreading: it means knowing exactly what can go wrong and where to look. A good post-editor is not fooled by the surface fluency of the text. They know the machine can translate an idiomatic expression literally, omit a negation, or subtly shift the scope of a legal clause without the result sounding "wrong" in the target language.

I have been offering this service to some of my clients for several years, always with one condition: the output must meet exactly the same standards as a human translation. I do not charge less for poor-quality post-editing; I charge less when the machine has done its part well and my revision work is lighter. The distinction matters.

My advice to any company looking to incorporate machine translation into their processes: do not cut corners on the post-editor. They are the guarantee that what reaches the end client — or the court, or the medical leaflet — is accurate, precise and in the appropriate register.