When I was taking Chinese classes in university, people would sometimes poke fun at the eccentric or badly accented English. I would as them how their Chinese sounds to their native-speaking instructors.
It is strange how the reaction to that was always one of confusion or dismissal.
Some manager who probably doesn't speak much English has tasked a random person on their staff who went to college in the US or UK with writing their English copy, without realizing the difference between "this person can communicate effectively 1:1 in English" and "this person can write formal English like a native speaker".
In other words, a task is being supervised by someone who doesn't understand the task. Just like every other company we deal with. As native (or at least highly fluent) speakers, we just happen to be competent to critique it.
However, I would not immediately characterise the copy as written by a US/UK college grad though - it feels like it is written by someone who learnt English on the mainland.
I don't really know why companies in various parts of East Asia don't hire/outsource to someone who actually is highly fluent in English to write/edit their copy. Sometimes I suspect it is simply due to cost, other times I suspect they just don't realise that their fluency is not quite.. 'international English' level
(No offence to anyone who runs/writes for East Asian company websites.)
Their limitations are effectively hidden from them. Odd things still come out, but in informal contexts it's not worth correcting, and there's little opportunity for formal critique. (There's also the issue of "face" that complicates matters and drives me insane. It's easier with people who have spent a few years in the US, though.)
If there's no (near-)native speaker around to check, nobody's going to notice until it goes out to the world, and then there are a half billion people ready to jump on it.
If they recognized it, I don't think cost would be a factor. I could review/correct a site like this in an hour (or less). I might spend a day on the mini-manuals that come with some gadgets.
When the peasants are revolting its very different from when the food is revolting!
You realize English should be capitalized, right?
Here i've cleaned up some of the copy from your sales page:
"WRTnode is a high performance, low power, small, inexpensive development board intended to run OpenWRT OS. It also easily ports open source software based on Linux.
Today, more and more devices are connecting to The Internet of Things. The WRTnode is a small node which can connect to the internet all by itself and perform complex tasks, like detecting a cat running by, or identifying your speech and twittering it, or checking your email and speaking it to you, or learning how your room is laid out and finding garbage to sweep while streaming video to you over the internet. [..] Open Source hardware for OpenWrt [..] [remove the line "smart machines' heart"] complete set of high performance I/O [..] Local dns uses i.wrtno.de, wrtnode.lan, and openwrt.lan [..] default WRTnode ip 192.168.8.1 [..] WRTnode additional features (source at github.com/WRTnode):"
..."Born to be proud" [...] doesn't sound natural to a native English speaker...
Have to agree. It's not idiomatic English, so it really fails when given such prominence on the site.It also has echoes of classic 1970s rock, which doesn't help (born to be wild, born to run).
In the future it shouldn't be too hard to find someone willing to support and a good open source project with some proof-reading. I may not be the best candidate, but it would be a good way for someone to get started helping the project, and could make a big difference if you are targeting a larger audience.