Today many editorial offices don’t even have the position of a proofreader. The management think authors and editors should be able to use their language correctly, and that spelling errors will be corrected by the text editor. Well…

Is any person who can write and read good enough to become a proofreader? Nothing could be further from the truth. Naturally, these are skills essential for proofreading, but this is just the foundation. In addition, a proofreader needs to have broad general and technical knowledge. Plus one more thing – you need to be observant. You might learn all that, but as with any other profession – some people simply have a talent for this.
The thing is, “proofreaders should know perfectly the language of the text; should understand whether the text is reasonable; should be able to take a critical approach to their knowledge; should be skilled in spelling and punctuation rules.” Sounds contemporary, right? But these are guidelines formulated back in the… 18th century by French encyclopedists, great scholars Diderot and d’Alambert, when working on their life project – the Great French Encyclopedia.
Even more was required from proofreaders in the memorial of “Association of Parisian Printhouses Proofreaders,” addressed to Academie Francaise in 1868. It went like this: a proofreader should be able to re-create the original text, often distorted at the first typesetting; to adjust the individual orthography of each author to the right principles established by the Academy; to give texts clarity by using correct and logic punctuation; to correct erroneous data, dates, quotes; to observe the principles of the art of printing; to devote long hours to reading varied texts, each time choosing a different topic, where every word can hide a trap, because following his thought the author might have read not what was printed, but what should have been printed. These are the principles of a profession that writers of all times have treated as the most important in the art of publishing.” Well, well, such recognition – I suppose gratification must have been adequate? We can assume this was the Association’s claim in the memorial.
It was also an important, or even very important, profession in the Communist era (you could have been imprisoned for mistakes that made somebody look funny). I.F. Bieliczkow in his work entitled “The proofreading technic” said: “Linguistic carelessness and editing errors were dominant in the capitalistic press, because the owner, a capitalistic publisher, did not care about the purity of language – sales rate being his only priority.”
How principled! I’m not sure if proofreading errors were an inherent element of capitalistic press, but I know the socialistic press wasn’t free of them either, an people were buying it anyway. When  Helmut Khol came to Wrocław, Poland’s national daily reported that during that historical visit of the German chancellor the guest was welcomed by Polish and German guts flattering in the wind (the word ‘flaki’ was used instead of the right ‘flagi’). Such a mistake might appear even in today’s papers, because an Internet dictionary would not underline the word ‘flaki,’ which is a perfectly correct Polish word. Proofreader’s profession can be dangerous. One Polish editor found out about this when she accepted for print a paper with a cover reporting that one of the spinning mill workers in the city of Łódź became THE MISTRESS OF THE YEAR… due to a typing error that turned the Polish word for  ‘woman’ into ‘mistress.’
Today the job is no easier for a proofreader, despite access to Internet and fantastic Mr Google. Moreover, it is now required a proofreader should speak – at least basic – English and should have basic knowledge about the subject of the text. Already Bieliczkow suggested a proofreader should know at least one modern foreign language, plus… ancient Greek and Latin (!).