As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey’s Mission Builder (“Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions”). I suspect not, because whereas Brits usually look at me as if I have suddenly produced a bloodstained axe from under my coat when, post-walk, I mention the word “evaluation”, Americans seem comfortable with the practice and sometimes seem to believe that doing an evaluation has somehow improved the walk they have just completed.

I wonder also whether (and how) you can identify the nationality of the writer of the following excerpt:

Source here. How did you do?

Categories: Languages, Splog

RSS: post comments, blog comments, blog posts

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

1. MM
   October 10th 2004 10:41

   The only thing that particularly strikes me is the ‘has wondered’. I would have expected ‘is wondering’ or ‘has been wondering’. Are there any other features that strike you?

2. Geoff
   October 10th 2004 13:51

   He doesn’t write like an English native speaker, so … he must be an Albertan. (Btw, whence comes the stupid dogma that you should only produce in a language which is your mother tongue? How much (good) Latin would not have been written if that rule had been applied before translation mafias got going?)

3. The German-English Translator
   November 9th 2004 06:01 The “baldie”
   The