Office communication. An adorable way of meeting new people every day.
Especially when communicating internationally, the non-native English seems to bend into an entangled jungle that molests both the creator and the receiver of the text. Especially when not very comfortable with a foreign language, the entwined phrase constructions seem to become a deceitful trap of assumingly showing off.
I was asking a couple of companies to send us a new price list of their products. It doesn’t seem very difficult, as if you’d just have to say “please”.
But it’s more awkward than that.
In German, for example, the phrase “über einen Hinweis, ob es eine Händlerpreisliste oder eine Endverbraucherpreisliste ist, würden wir uns ebenso freuen wir über eine Info mit welchen Rabatten wir kalkulatorisch planen sollen” is in my opinion a reason for instant suicide in the beginning. And when you need to address somebody abroad with an respectfully overwhelming politeness of the kind, the sentences start to resemble something they compile with assistance of century-old dictionaries in middle Asia. Engrish, they call it.
As the unexplainable officialese pressure just doesn’t let you write “let us know,” the playful possibilities of writing “do not forget not to leave unspecified..” or “we do not wish you not preventing the failure at filling in..” stop by just to see how many double, triple or even more negations you can fit in a single sentence.
Eventually the recipient just deletes the mail with a sigh, hoping that less mad people could use the internet.
I think I need to slap myself just to keep it simple.
