Frequently asked questions

Proofreading corrects surface errors: spelling, punctuation, grammar, agreement, typos and formatting slips. Editing also works on clarity, sentence structure, tone, word choice, terminology and consistency across the document.

Every ProofreadLab order includes both passes at no extra cost, because asking you to diagnose your own draft before anyone has read it is a poor way to sell editing.

Your document is edited by a subject-matched editor and then reviewed in full by a second senior editor, who checks the first editor's changes and looks again at clarity and consistency. Two people catch different things. It is the right choice for a manuscript going to a competitive journal or a university press.

No. Editors work within the meaning you wrote. Where a sentence is ambiguous, the editor leaves a comment asking what you intended rather than guessing. Anything beyond the language pass, such as restructuring an argument, belongs to developmental editing and is quoted separately.

No. Every document is edited by a human editor. We do not paste your work into public AI tools, and our editors are contractually prohibited from doing so.

We can also read a draft you wrote with AI assistance and flag passages that read as machine-generated, so you can decide what to do about them before submission.

Two files plus a short report: a clean copy with every change applied, a tracked-changes copy so you can review each edit, and an editor's summary listing the recurring issues and any queries that need your decision.

We count the words your word processor reports for the body text you send us, including footnotes and endnotes. Reference lists, tables, figure captions and appendices are counted only if you ask us to edit them.

If your file arrives as a PDF or LaTeX source we confirm the count with you before work starts. Minimum charge is 500 words.

We check when the file arrives. If it differs materially we contact you with the corrected price before starting, and you can cancel at no charge. We never quietly bill more than the quote.

Yes. Ask for an institutional invoice when you order and we will issue one addressed to your department, grant or purchase-order number, with the payment terms your finance office needs. Institutions with an approved purchase order are invoiced on delivery rather than in advance.

You choose your method — bKash, Bangladesh bank transfer, US bank transfer / ACH, Wise, Payoneer or an institutional invoice — when you send the order. We create the order and give it a reference such as PL-XXXX-XX, then the payment details for that method appear on your own order page. You pay, send us the transaction or reference number, and a person checks it against our account before the order is marked as paid. ProofreadLab will never ask for your PIN, OTP, CVV, card password or online-banking password. If you receive such a request claiming to be from us, please tell us.

Yes. Send a .tex file or a zipped project and we edit the source directly, leaving your markup, environments, labels and citation commands intact. We can also work from a compiled PDF and return a commented file if you prefer to make the changes yourself.

Word (.doc, .docx), OpenDocument (.odt), rich text (.rtf), LaTeX (.tex, or a .zip project) and PDF, up to 25 MB through the order form. Larger files are welcome as a shared-drive link — email us and we will send an upload link instead.

Yes. We convert it to Unicode first and send you the converted file to confirm before any editing starts, because conversion can introduce errors of its own. Conversion is included at no extra charge.

Yes. We supply a signed certificate of translation accuracy on ProofreadLab letterhead, which most universities, courts and immigration offices accept.

Tell us in the order notes which authority the document is for so that the wording matches their requirement. Check first whether they need a sworn or notarised translation — those are legal formalities that vary by country, and we will tell you honestly if what you need is outside what we can issue.

No. Translations are produced by a human translator from the source, then revised against the source by a second linguist. We do not sell cleaned-up machine output, and we do not run your document through an online translator at any stage.

You do, on payment. We keep no rights over the translated text, we do not reuse your content, and we do not add it to any training corpus or shared translation memory.