#*&%@^+$%!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday the CD containing the full set of projects arrived and I feel embarrassed, mortified, and generally awful!

In my last post I was upset by the "magazines to cut pictures OUT OF", the grammatically incorrect title of one of the projects, and the lack of any information about the project for the potential purchaser. Well, to use a totally ungrammatical expression, "I ain't hadn't seen nothin yet!"

When I opened the Spanish projects I became sicker as I saw each one. Problem #1: Rather than use the excellent, imaginative student projects we had submitted as examples, they have a series of boring, unimaginative, incomplete, and generally amateurish and sloppy projects made by someone at the company. It's possible that it's illegal for them to use real student work, but why not tell us that and let us make good projects or hire someone who can do a good job? Not only are the project examples awful, they are on the very first page. But wait, it gets worse!

In spite of a big check mark and notation saying "proofread" on each page, I found multiple egregious errors in the Spanish projects---and these are first year projects! Let me illustrate with just one example that is so awful it's funny. In a vocabulary section I had given the Spanish word for "short". Now, in Spanish it is customary to indicate the masculine (ending in -o) and feminine (ending in -a) forms of an adjective by writing the word with the -o ending, followed by a slash, and the letter a. So "short" was written as corto/a. In this project, the person wrote the word
cortola. She replaced the slash with an "l" and wrote a non-existent word---and , obviously didn't have a clue she was wrong, wrong, wrong!

Two caveats. The text we wrote seems to be untouched and fine. The French projects are more carefully and accurately done. They are not great, but probably are acceptable. I await Jill's evaluation of the French language.

(Jill and Donna - No wisecracks about the French being all around better at everything. Thought, in this case that seems to be true!)

Naturally, our editor must have taken a long weekend because there has been no answer to the long e-mails we've sent. I can't imagine that a reputable company would not want to correct these errors....but I couldn't imagine before that there would be these errors.

Stay tuned til Monday when we will hopefully get some resolution. Until then I feel like my professional reputation has been violated and I've been shamed in front of the whole foreign language profession.

Now I'm going to the basement to do the FOURTH proofread of the revised handbook for one of my BER presentations. That's because I'm obsessively careful about anything that is published with my name on it That's how important my professional reputation is to me!