Just a little anecdote that came up last night in conversation and made me smile as I remembered it – Six years ago or so, I had been working for Roche a few months and one of my Spanish colleagues, whose command of English was rather sketchy, came to me and asked me to help her compose a report she had to send to other colleagues of ours in Germany. It involved the products that we managed within the world of diabetes and what she wanted to communicate was the details of a problem with the faulty battery contacts of a blood glucose metre of one of our customers. It was simple enough and I put it into English for her and she sent off her report. Within a few hours she received a reply from them and came running back to me; could I look at what they had replied?
“Please re-write your report in grammatical English.”
As I read this I cracked a slightly sarcastic smile.
Can I reply? I asked Lurdes, and she said by all means.
“I am English…….Would it help if I put the verb at the end?”
That was the last we heard of the matter.