Once I re-read the submission I wanted to reject it immediately, but I realized that I should get a second opinion first. So I contacted the editors, who agreed that it was blatant plagiarism. Hence, they rejected the paper once I recommended rejection in my second review. So this wasn't just a conversation where I made some suggestions and the authors used them. Even the editors thought it was plagiarism once they looked at it.
An acknowledgment would be impossible because the review was single-blind. The reviewers knew the identities of the authors but not the other way around. What the authors should have done was just re-phrase where they used the term in the paper. They didn't even need to copy my explanation, to be frank. The paper would worked fine without the paragraph they copied. If they just re-phrased the relevant parts no other changes would have been needed and this whole thing could have been avoided.
In the absence of an explicit directive or request from you, given that the authors are from a different culture, how do you expect them to know what was required by them?
I don't mean to be snarky or accusative. Your comment was thoughtful, articulate and detailed, which tells me you are a sophisticated communicator.
But that said, I've often times wondered if this requirement of having to "rewrite in your own words" may do a lot of harm too. It obfuscates that things that people are talking about are actually exactly the same, or make it fuzzy what the exact differences are.
In a particular academic CS area I've witnessed people reproduce again and again the essentially identical description of setting and assumptions, but in being afraid of plagiarism accusations, they over and over re-formulate things which made it nonobvious that things are the same as from other authors or even from their own earlier work.
1. authors submit a paper with expository sections about (eg) some materials being flammable and others inflammable
2. reviewer tries to explain that they have incorrectly understood the meaning of the terms, explains the meaning carefully and maybe suggests the terms they might mean.
3. Authors copy in the explanation and maybe replace incorrect usages with weird tortured phrases
4. Rejection
Obviously this description reads a little bit silly and things were probably more nuanced in practice. I think I’m probably also being uncharitable towards the authors in the example.
4. Rejection
5. Authors replace terms in verbatim copy with weird tortured phrases
6. Authors submit to other journals, get published
This is a very subtle distinction and it sounds like being more explicit about it would have been a good idea.