Would it be ethical to hire a proofreader for theses and academic articles? Proofreading documents for orthography is a pain. I consider that I am decent at writing in my native language (on the grammar and orthography side), but proofreading for typos and whatnots is a time-consuming pain. I’d much prefer to have someone else do it for me, but it's a pain to bother other people with it. Also, when I read students’ work, in some cases it requires two iterations (because it's hard to focus on the science when the spelling is… suboptimal).

So, given that a professional proofreader would be much more efficient at this job than me, leaving me more time to review the scientific content or otherwise actually do research, the logical conclusion is that I should hire one. This would work either for my own writing or for 

I know some people actually do that (and also buy more extensive services) for grant writing. However, I wonder: is it ethical to hire a proofreader for theses and academic articles?
Short answer

Yes, it is ethical

Long answer

The three options are:


Proof-reading it yourself
Asking a co-author (for academic article) or a 3rd person (for theses) to proof-read it
Pay for a commercial proofreading service.


As I see it:


Option (1) is inefficient. You've written the text, read it many times over, and your brain will simply fool you in not seeing the typo's.
Option (2) is done quite often in practice. In my opinion, it's most suitable for journal articles; some articles have quite a lot of co-authors, and one could give a section to each co-author and distribute the work. That's what I usually do (my thesis will be quite small, because it's just a summary for a sandwich thesis). 
As for option (3), I don't see any ethical problems with paying for a proofreading service. I know a number of people (they are not native speakers) who do this systematically for theses and academic articles. They buy commercial services who check and correct the quality of their English writing. This improves the quality of the text and therefore reduces the chance to annoy the reviewers.