I’ve done it, and basically what happens is that a non-native speaker writes the original, I rewrite it into something intelligible, and then the original writer “corrects” it by changing most of what I’ve written back to the original. If I’m lucky, I got to meet this writer face-to-face and explain why I made the changes I made. In those cases, I could usually persuade them to go along with my version.
What’s really bad is writing corporate documents like annual reports, vision statements, etc. Since they’re often written by someone relatively high up in the company, none of the people that I have to deal with have the guts to tell their boss that his English is wrong (or, quite often, even if they do tell him, he refuses to hear it). The most annoying part is that when the American branches see the final copy, they start squawking about how bad it is and I’m the one who gets shit for pinhead-san’s writing.
My company is headquarted in Sweden. Our manuals are written in Swedish. After the computer gets done with the translation into English, there are times you would swear that somebody went to babel fish and went
Swedish>German>French>Arabic>Hindu>Japanese>English
I did an edit on one document where the only word I did not replace on one page was several occurences of the word “the”
Here is the above portion of my post washed through Babel fish a few times
Yup, reads like some of our manuals.
One of my counterparts in Russia told me that a washer (for a bolt) translates into Russian as “washing machine”
Our owners manuals (thank God) are translated by humans.