A small editing practice, not a marketplace

Why we exist

Most editing services are marketplaces. You upload a file, an algorithm assigns whoever is cheapest and available, and the person who edits your chapter on nineteenth-century land tenure has spent the morning on a marketing brochure. The work comes back grammatically clean and subtly wrong, and you cannot tell which parts to trust.

We work the other way round. Editors are recruited into subject areas, tested on real academic text, and assigned by field. If we cannot match your discipline, we say so before you pay. That costs us orders, and it is the whole point.

What we believe about editing

The author's meaning is not ours to improve

An editor's job is to make your sentence say what you meant, not what the editor would have meant. Where a sentence could go two ways, the editor asks. Nobody at ProofreadLab silently decides what your results show.

Proofreading and editing are one job

Selling them separately asks you to diagnose your own draft before you have had it read. Both passes are included in every order at one price, so you never pay for the wrong tier.

Human work, declared

Every document is edited or translated by a person. We do not run your text through a language model and sell the output, and our editors are contractually prohibited from doing so. When a service will not say this plainly, it is usually because it cannot.

Confidentiality is an operational matter

Unpublished research is often the only copy of an idea. Protecting it means access controls, signed agreements and scheduled deletion — not a reassuring sentence in a footer. Ours are described in detail on the confidentiality page.

Where we are

ProofreadLab is based in New York, United States, and works with authors and institutions worldwide. Our Bengali translators and editors are native speakers of the language, working in South Asia; our English editors are distributed across time zones, which is what makes the shorter return times possible.

Because we sit in both language communities, the Bengali–English work is not an add-on bought from an agency. It is done by people we recruited and tested ourselves, to the same standard as the English editing.