Lost on Jeju looks at that and other issues with the Jeju International School website:
For something as important as this project, why in the hell can't certain people swallow their pride and let an educated, conscientious NATIVE SPEAKER review all the English language materials before putting them on the 'net.
There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for idiotic mistakes in English to be on the Global Education Project/Jeju International School website when the office responsible for the English has access to well over 150 native speakers!
Did they just coin a new portmanteau here? Maybe the president's greetiongs will shed some light on that.
7 comments:
What's more depressing than an "International School" allowing multiple spelling mistakes on a single page of their site? The fact that those mistakes almost certainly WON'T cause Korean parents to question the quality of the school.
Oh well, at least they gave us the word "Introducation".
As a "conscientious native speaker" who has worked on English sites for several government agencies (not the Jeju International School site, however), I can say (at least in my experience) that the problem often resides with the company doing the actual coding of the site. Often (and regrettably) text cannot simply be cut and paste into the application that is being used to build the site. So, people who often have no knowledge of English whatsoever are asked to physically type certain portions of the site into various different applications and that is, obviously, never given back the the "conscientious native speaker" to proofread; that is where the problems resides.
A similar thing happens with books, too. The final printing application cannot accept MS Word or Haansoft Hangul files and a large team of people (often with no knowledge of English) have to re-type everything that was has already been written and proofread by a team of "conscientious native speakers" who then never have a chance to proofread it again.
I offer this information not as an excuse or a “free-pass” for whoever was involved with the JIS site, but rather as means to highlight where the real problem resides.
Really, are these mistakes any worse than Pagoda (arguably Korea's longest-running adult hagwon) using the motto "You Can Do!" for 30 years?
Oooh, you can contact the U.S., too!
It sounds the opposite from when I worked in a digital print shop in Rochester, NY. We'd do pre-press for regional and national campaigns for Xerox, Kodak and Wegman's. I'd find spelling and grammar mistakes and point it out to the bosses.
"It's not your job to fix the spelling. Just get it printed."
That's an interesting point, Walter. I used to do some proofreading and editing at school, but the changes I made still had to be typed in by secretaries or whomever who had no knowledge of English (or punctuation, apparently), which made for a lot of mistakes.
What does the Task Force do? It can't be proof-reading.
Post a Comment