She needed to write an e-mail to a customer in the US. She ran it by me to make sure it was OK. It was short but had a couple of problems that required me asking her questions to ensure I knew what she was saying, so after she explained it, I rewrote the whole thing as a native speaker (such as myself) would.

She later ran it by her boss (not admitting that someone from the US wrote it for her) and the boss didn’t like it – so the boss rewrote the whole thing himself, much worse than my friend did to begin with!

I think in many cases they just don’t realize that what they write is so bad. They don’t hire a native speaker because it never crosses their mind that there might be a problem with what they wrote themselves.

Something like this is prolly better, but no Chinglish.

This bloke stuck a keyring camera on his model plane FTW, same as just about everyone else with a RC aircraft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxS1pd7pVPg

I believe it’s an attempt “gangsta up” (see below) the product.

“You da IRC, dawg!”

What troubles me is that these companies may have hired just 1 native english speaker to polish up their presentations.

What I don’t know is whether this is a testament to just how incomplete dictionary definitions really are(leading the guy with a basic knowledge of English grammar and a dictionary to make technically-accurate-but-not-right selections for many of the words) or whether it is a testament to how robust our abilities to infer meaning from badly mangled natural language are…

But, then again, most uses of the term UFO are wrong and I should stop caring about it because I’ll never win.  Cool toy, though.