[hannob]

There are a lot of reasons to criticize Wosign. Lack of English skills isn't one of them.

I didn't realize this until I first visited China, but there are parts of the world where it's really hard to find people fluent in English. If you require people to be fluent in English in order to participate in running the Internet you're locking a large number of world regions out.

[AdmiralAsshat]

I wouldn't hold it against a Chinese company for not having a native English speaker. But I would hold it against them for not at least having a native speaker on retainer to proofread a document that they're about to send out to an international community. It just looks unprofessional.

And that's all it is, really. Stuff that just screams, "Did no one proofread this thing before sending it out?" Probably not. Because whoever wrote it was probably the most fluent person at the company.

---

FWIW, I have native-English speaking programmer friends who ask me to proofread their stuff. I don't mind. One is an amazing programmer, but his writing ability is somewhere around 9th-grade proficiency. The fact remains that being able to write correctly is considered a "bare minimum" quality in the professional world, and it doesn't matter if you wrote your own virtual machine in Assembly in your spare time--if you sound like a college dropout in your resume, they'll skip over you.

It is similarly difficult to inspire confidence in a CA when their "transparency report" sounds unprofessionally cobbled together.

[wbl]

Learn. You only need a handful of people to read the language in which 99% of all scientific publications are written in.

Reading knowledge of a language can be gotten fairly quickly.

[hannob]

This wasn't about reading knowledge, it was about writing knowledge. The original poster was complaining about grammar errors in their own publications. And even learning reading knowledge of a language that is totally different from your own isn't so easy. I spent quite some time trying to learn Mandarin.

Also out of curiosity: How many languages that are not related to your native language can you fluently read?

[aianus]

There are millions and millions of people in Canada and the US that are fluent in both English and Mandarin. Hire one of them.