[NTLK] [OT} Re: 20 MB memory cards FAQ

[Forrest]

As someone who worked closely with Indian subcontractors in 2002-3 while at then-America Online (the company had just opened a call center in Bangalore), I can tell you than many in the country of India are quite proud of their English usage...and in many cases, rightfully so. You could make an argument that overall usage is much better than ours in the West and especially in the US, where poor English--written and spoken--often grates against my ears like nails on a chalkboard.

But the thing is, there's a big difference between a book-learned language and actually learning it from the natives "on the street," so to speak. Someone once said that the actual language is what's spoken by the people, not what's in books. I think they do a pretty good job on the TV show "The Big Bang Theory" showing Rajesh's struggles with English slang.

America Online sent a team to Bangalore to help train the new hires in the operations of the call center...while I was not amongst them, I had good friends that did go. They reported how precise and almost haughty the Indian employees were with their use of English, but how confounded they were with our slang and colloquialisms.

Thanks,
--Forrest

Sent from my AT&T iPhone 4

On Dec 4, 2012, at 6:18 AM, Lord Groundhog <lordgroundhog at gmail.com> wrote:

> Consider what happens already when you phone a help-line only
> to discover it has been outsourced to a country where the dialect of English
> is quite different from your own.  People like to point to India for an
> example of this, but that's primarily due to pronunciation and in
> particular, where the stress falls in polysyllabic words.  The standard of
> written English is quite high there.