By David Simmons
“Revering Editor, You will find me to submit a high quality opinions. I request to give me space again.....”
I received the above plea from a Pakistani whom I had earlier asked to submit far fewer articles to the website I edit for, and that he work much harder to fix up the English on those he did submit. The problem, I explained, was that his English was so poor that it took more time and effort than it was worth to make his articles publishable.
I further suggested that he request the assistance of acquaintances with “better-honed English skills” when making his writing suitable for others to attempt to read and understand. (He claims to be affiliated with Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad, a public research institution in the Pakistani capital.)
The response was heated.
“The english mode, I develop my arguments, is not bad,” he insisted in an e-mail. “However, you said it is bring trouble to you. So, I want you to finish my status as an opinion writer. I have several other publication, to work with them, who give worth to my work.”
I thanked him for the offer and said it would be accepted immediately. I wished him the best with “several other publication”, noting that they must either have lower English standards than our website or large editing staffs. “I wish we did too, but wishing doesn’t make it so.”
The later e-mail quoted at the top of this article suggests he has since reconsidered his decision to sever ties with our website.
I’m not picking on Pakistanis. Since becoming an editor in Asia, I have encountered many examples of highly educated people, including university professors with PhDs in relatively well-off “tiger" states such as South Korea, apparently unaware of the poverty of their English competence. Not always – some are grateful, and say so graciously, for the effort editors expend to make their writing look good. But the tendency of some to be offended when native English speakers find their writings in need of repair is particularly startling when they supposedly hold high educational credentials in their homelands.
Certainly it is not fair that by an accident of history, much of it in the form of brutal and racist colonization, English became and has remained the “world language”. Why should Pakistanis and Thais and Japanese and Arabs and even the speakers of Indo-European tongues to whom English is not so frustratingly alien, such as Indians, Brazilians and Hispanics, need to struggle with a language burdened with a highly complex grammar and logic-challenged spelling system in order to share their wisdom with the world?
We may wish they didn’t, but wishing won’t make it so. Standard Chinese, basically the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, is gradually making dents in the dominance of English. One of its major advantages, in contrast to the shambolic nature of written English, is an ideographic/pictographic writing system that can be read by speakers of any Chinese language or dialect, many of which are not mutually comprehensible in their spoken forms. However, the fact is that untranslated Chinese still lacks strong influence outside the (admittedly very large) Chinese community.
Therefore pride and nationalism have no place in educational systems. Educators, and educational institutions, serious about preparing their students for the wider world must make high-quality English programs central to their curriculums.
