RE: What to do???

["Brautigam, Curtis" <cubrautiga -at- state -dot- pa -dot- us>]

Wade,

I understand how frustrating it is to edit documents written by people whose mother tongue is not English. You just need to have patience. I am fluent in Russian and let me give you some information about the grammatical structure of the Russian language to help you get a little perspective on your editing;

- Russian does not use indefinite or definite articles. The use of articles is one of the most difficult things a Russian-speaker has to deal with when learning English.

- Russian sentence structure is much more flexible than that of English. In Russian, it is perfectly acceptable to put the object at the front of the sentence with the subject following the verb. This is often done for purposes of emphasis. English uses a strict subject-verb-object sentence structure.

- The use of prepositions differs from language to language. Russian is no exception. In many instances, Russian uses different prepositions from those used in English. One of the keys to the mastery of a foreign language is the use of prepositions.

- Russian grammar has such things as noun, adjective, and pronoun declensions, gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and verb aspects that are not found in English.

- In my opinion, English has more irregular verbs than Russian.

- Russians frequently complain to me about the fact that English is not a phonetic language, which does not help reading and writing skills. However, Russian is also not a phonetic language, even though it uses a different alphabet.

- In Russian writing, the passive voice is used much more than in English. It is much more acceptable to use the passive voice in Russian than in English, and this creates real difficulties for translation.

I hope that this gives you a little perspective in your editing.

Chaim Brautigam
Descriptive Statistician 1
Center for Workforce Information
PA Department of Labor and Industry
cubrautiga -at- state -dot- pa -dot- us


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