どんな印象ですか？

What's your impression?

先輩技師：日本の科学者が書いた英語をどのように思いますか？

英文編集者：日本人は英語を書くとき一所懸命に努力します．それに，前もって長時間勉強します．ただ残念なことに，その英語の勉強のもとになっているものが，たいていの場合悪いのですね．学校の先生は英語のどの部分もうまくできないでいて，英語を教えようとします．英語がへただということに対して，よくそれは読みかたと訳すことに重きを置きすぎているからだといわれますが，もしそうなら，なぜ私は今まで一度も好きで英語を読んでいる日本人に会ったことがないのでしょう？

Senior technologist : What's your impression of the English written by Japanese scientists ?

English editor : Japanese scientists work① very hard when they write English, andthey spend a lot of time studying beforehand. Unfortunately, the sources② from which they learn English are generally of poor quality. Teachers in school try to teach English without being fluent③ in any aspect④ of it. The reason often given for their poor English is that too much stress is placed on reading and translation. If so, why do I never meet Japanese who read English for pleasure ? The Japanese textbooks that I've seen on how to write scientific papers in English are flawed.⑤ One, written by a native speaker of English, has some helpful explanations, but has wrong answers in the back of the book.⑥ This confuses the reader. I assume that the mistakes were made during translation and printing. Those written by Japanese make a few good points, but they also contain many mistakes and printing errors. English for Medical TechnologistsOne problem is that many students believe that the teachers and textbooks are correct. One piece of advice⑦ for you is not to believe something just because it is printed in a book. The only other source as a model for writing English isthe scientific literature. However, scientific papers are usually far from perfect, whether written by native speakers of English or not. Scientists are not always good with words.⑧ They, like you, have the scientific literature as their main model of how to write English. Most papers could be written more clearly, with simplerwords. Some scientists like long, complicated sentences. Perhaps they are afraid that if science is made too easy, there will be too much competition.⑨