We work in a multinational consultancy and do software development for companies all over Europe. We are located in Slovakia and our current client was in Germany. Although some of our developers could speak German none of them were native speakers but most of our developers could speak some degree of English. The client wasn’t going to learn Slovak but were content with the German and English support that we could offer.
Ladislav actually had a lessor grasp on English than the rest of us but he had a lot of self confidence. Even though he knew that he was not native, he felt himself to be quite advanced. When Ladislav was at a loss for a word, he would resort to an online translation tool. The thing with translations is that there is no single perfect word that can be used in all situations. The words that come back are usually ranked as most common first and then moving to more esoteric translations.
What made Ladislav’s emails interesting was because when ever he needed an English word he would do the translation and then take the last translation in the list – well because the others are just so common. I am not a big fan of most of the things that end up in my inbox but I always loved receiving something from Ladislav.