Academic English editing in the era of COVID-19: A corpus-assisted case study

Abstract

This thesis aims to contribute to research on Academic English editing by examining the copy-editing and revision work on The Italian Economy after COVID-19: Short-term Costs and Long-term Adjustments, a collection of scholarly contributions on the socioeconomic and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. The work was completed by three language professionals hired by the publisher, Bononia University Press (BUP). At the time, they were working for BUP as interns for the Digital Open Transformation (DOT) project, a collaboration between the publisher and the Department of Interpreting and Translation (DIT), University of Bologna. Through a corpus-based approach, this thesis seeks to reveal the possible cross-reviser inconsistencies due to individual inclinations and preferences in their editing and revision work and discuss the possible reasons behind them, thus providing evidence to the indispensability of well-defined rules and a functional workflow for Academic English editors and revisers. In Chapter 1, previous literature, covering both research on editing and revision and genre-based research on Academic English, is reviewed. In Chapter 2, a brief account of the project setting, including information on the publisher, the revised book and the major participants in its publication process, the three revisers studied in this thesis, and their copy-editing and revision workflow, is provided. In Chapter 3, the methodology of this study is explained, along with the materials and tools used. In Chapter 4, the results of the analyses are presented and an attempt is made to discuss the possible reasons behind such inconsistencies based on previous literature, the revisers' background information, and the project setting.