I have often felt that editing in Goan English dailies is atrocious. Properly spelled words in submitted OpED manuscripts are misspelled in the final print, and the English language is butchered mercilessly from time to time. Mind you, this is not a case of Indian English or Goan English. I used to think in the old days that these problems were caused by the typesetters with limited knowledge of English. But now it appears that they reside in the editors or editorial assistants or proof readers.
Last week I submitted an OpED entitled "A Bundh is a Blot on Democracy". In the published version that came out in Herald I found several alterations. Here is a link to it: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gulf-goans/message/34740?var=0 The removal of the indefinite article at the beginning of the title was fine. So was the transmutation of "bundh" to "bandh". But I found several unexplained instances of tampering with the text that made no editorial (and in at least one case, no grammatical) sense. Why was "on June 6th" changed to the non-grammatical "on the June 6"? Why was "soundly" substituted for "roundly"? Why was "To the extent that a public policy restricts that choice, it is a bad policy" elongated to "If a public policy suppresses that choice, it is automatically construed as a bad policy"? Why was "for the sake of parity and a head start" truncated in words and meaning to "for the sake of parity"? Why was "other ways of incentivizing the spread of Konknni" misinterpreted as "other ways of preserving the Konknni language"? My hunch is that whoever assumed the role of an editor here is unfamiliar with words in current usage such as "roundly", "incentivizing" and "head start", and with commonly used English expressions such as "To the extent that". This would have been understandable in the past when good dictionaries and thesauruses were less accessible. But today there is no excuse. Cheers, Santosh
