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Seems to me that your examples are of Native English speakers/users. Maybe not Native Americans or Native Britains, but native speakers nonetheless.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sabahat Ashraf [SMTP:sabahat_ashraf -at- MENTORG -dot- COM]
Sent: Thursday, September 11, 1997 1:02 PM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Native English Speaking Requirement
I am's a little concerned. Witness the following snippets from Job Posts on
Techwr-L:
On Sep 9, 7:32am, Guy Thomas wrote:
> You are a native English speaker with excellent technical writing
On Sep 11, 6:18pm, Chiba Atsushi wrote:
> Now we are looking for competent technical writers (native English speakers
> only) who can proofread/rewrite translated text. Proofreading/rewriting means
My question(s):
-- I had a 98 percentile score in the English part of the GRE. This means that
98% of people that took the GRE with me scored less than I did. And this
definitely includes "native speakers" since this is a standard test for
Graduate Admission in North America and beyond. This is not TOEFL I am talking
about, which is the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Would I qualify for
the above jobs? [I am not applying right now; I am quite happy with my present
job, thank you.] I am definitely not a "Native Speaker" since both my parents
are Urdu-speaking [the official language of Pakistan and one of the major
languages of North India]; but all my education has been in the English
Language.
-- What, for example, of people from Southern India? They live in country where
the only way they can communicate with a majority of their compartriots [and
there's about a billion of them] is by using English. As such I would consider
these people very appropriate to write across cultures. And some of these
people have a command of the language I would dare you to find anywhere else.
-- Generally, if you are looking for people to write across geographical and
cultural divides, wouldn't you rather pick a person that has experience of
doing this or would you just look for a "native speaker" that has probably
never even had to keep up a social conversation with a foreigner? [Professional
exchanges don't count; but even if they did, how many of these "native
speakers" have had them?]
And please: I am not flaming; I am not p.o.'ed; I am just raising an issue I
want to discuss with y'all.
Sabahat.
--
Sabahat_Ashraf -at- MentorG -dot- com
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"I am unworthy."
-- Mother Teresa [1910-1997]
on hearing she had won the Nobel Prize
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