LifeinAsia - 4:13 pm on Mar 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

I've dealt with people whose bosses hired them because they were supposedly fluent in English ..except they weren't ..but the boss thought their English was great ..so did all their friends and their co workers ..and they even had degrees in English ..still couldn't speak nor read and write in it

Been there too! I've gotten a lot of work going back and fixing the writings of these English "masters." OTOH, I've also seen a lot of non-natives who can speak/write far better than Native English speakers, but that's a thread for a different day. :)

We've spent a lot of money translating our sites. So I am utterly thrilled that Google is (supposedly) taking steps to ensure that people who use machine translated content don't appear above me in the SERPs.