Red pen heaven?

At the PCT in the UK, I became known as the Red Pen Queen because I was so finicky about correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. Cambodian peoples’ valiant attempts at written English are creating a big challenge for me. People who can speak fluent English here are still rubbish at writing. The following is a typical piece of translation by Tha, who is pretty good at written English in comparison with most:

Employee, who wants to take annual leave, has to fill in the form which request admin-assistant and then s/he could respectfully submit to Unit Manager at least two weeks before setting planed leave date. If anyone has missed or s/he doesn’t obey this workflow, the Unit Manager must monitor, scrutinize, and couldn’t allow if it is impacted on the project plans.

I can usually understand the gist of such gibberish, but I have great difficulty in then rewriting it into good English. It would be much easier to write from scratch.

Now that I understand Khmer structures better, I have a lot of sympathy for Khmer translators, as in their language there aren’t enough words or tenses, no punctuation, no gaps between words and no differentiation between singulars / plurals or genders. They also have the worst dictionaries I’ve ever seen, with numerous “English” words that look like gobbledygook to me, e.g. abaca, abaft, abapical, abasia, abattial, abaxial........ What?????!!!!!