Word Perfect: Christian Proofreaders Celebrate a Billion Bibles Checked
Peachtree Publishing Services reviews 80 percent of Protestant Bibles in the US, looking at 300,000 details in each project.
When Jan Gibbs began proofreading Bibles 14 years ago for Peachtree Publishing Services, which celebrated in December the distribution of a billion copies of its works, she first had to learn to draw lines.
In the Bible’s poetry books in particular, primary, secondary and tertiary vertical lines designate the indentation for each horizontal line of text. Line placement must match the translators’ desires to a tee.
Mastering poetry alignment, she moved to proofreading running heads to conform to each publisher’s order. Then footnotes. Then word breaks.
Cumbersome to many, to Gibbs it’s mother’s milk.
“I find it fascinating,” said Gibbs, who today is Peachtree’s vice president of Bible proofreading. “My husband said that this would absolutely drive him insane.”
When proofreading God’s inerrant Word, there’s no room for error.
Peachtree proofreads 80 percent of the English Protestant Bibles in the US, proofreads many Catholic Bibles and serves publishers worldwide, Peachtree president Chris Hudson told Baptist Press.
“We are making sure everything is as perfect as can be,” he said. “We want people to find God when they read the Bible, not find a mistake.”
But surely, with so many details in play, someone must have made an error somewhere in Peachtree’s history, one could presume.
“We don’t get a lot of feedback of mistakes. Mostly we’re catching lots of mistakes before it’s printed,” Hudson said. “Every step along the way gets looked at at least twice by different people. Through our electronic and our people checks we’re catching most things. But we are human, so occasionally we’ll get ...