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Not surprising, but I've seen it go the other way too. When I was
teaching in Japan, a fellow foreign English teacher was asked to proof a
letter that one of the teachers had written. She corrected it, and her
supervisor wanted to look at it too. After reading it, he put all the
mistakes that she had corrected back into the letter. Feh.
But editing ESL work isn't just a matter of grammar and vocab. Lots of
the mistakes I edited out in Korea were a matter of common usage. The
grammar was correct, but "we just don't say it that way." English can be
a very gray language, even in hard-core tech fields. Taking otherwise
correct English and massaging it into natural English is a valid task for
native language editors.
> ... I've even seen reviewers
> return review comments about the quality of the English in well-written
> manuscripts: the comments themselves are often barely decipherable, and
> the language of the manuscript is fine, but they somehow feel obliged
> to "put the foreigners in their place". Stupid, but there you have it.
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