I must admit to feeling puzzled and a little stressed out whenever the question of an author’s English proficiency comes up in reviews and discussions–I think mostly because the notion of native-speaker-level proficiency remains a bit opaque to me. What is the standard against which authors are being evaluated? E.g., Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish, Virginia Woolf, Strunk and White, Associated Press Style Guide, perfect score on the TOEFL exam? There’s variation even among those examples (and they also mostly reflect my own context as a person in the U.S. who’s most familiar with American English 
). I definitely agree that a ton of grammatical errors in a language-based medium would be very burdensome and distracting to players, but I could see focusing on identifying the particular issue, and then sharing the specific effect that it had on the reader’s experience of the work. E.g., the frequent subject-verb agreement errors really took me out of the story; the author’s ambiguous use of prepositions made it hard for me to figure out what commands to enter; the author used a lot of idioms that I’m unfamiliar with and it filled the story with moments of surprise and delight 
. An approach like that might be helpful to authors regardless of whether English is their first, second, third, or fourth language.
Well said. I suspect many are more concerned about the manner folks use in addressing these issues than their choice to acknowledge them in the first place.
I think writing IF is hard, and translation is hard on top of that. Is there a big IF translation award? Perhaps the languages and audiences are too scattered for that.
I think/hope people here would be very open to a call for testing/reading a translated work. While my writing was in English, I relied heavily on testers for typo detection and other issues because I just don’t have the attention span for adequate proofreading. My game would have been a complete mess without their help.
On the subject of translations, I think back to One Way Ticket, where the writer’s first language was Russian, I think. One of the characters’ names was Bing Dingle. From a native speaker, this would be an almost immediate heck-no, but I think it worked really well in OWT, way better than, say “Fred Jones.” And of course there were the general dialogue tics.
But I’ve also found that UK and Australian English and their quirks open up so much I wouldn’t have seen from just reading American stuff, and sometimes even regional differences (Texas would be the obvious one e.g. “all hat no cattle”) have a different way of speaking where I hear something I haven’t heard before and I immediately know what it means.
Helping proofread Marco Innocenti’s translations of his two Andromeda games was enlightening for me, too, as I realized just how many ways there were to say something logically that didn’t conform to grammar rules, and so many of my translation suggestions might, in fact, not bring some of the meaning Marco wanted to put into his writing, and I could only guess at the aesthetic bits that might be lost.
I’ve even found trouble when writing about, say, chess, because analysis has a language of its own, and it’s tough to translate into something non-players can understand without either insulting their intelligence or going way over their head. But it’s really neat to see how many content creators etc. formulate things in certain ways.
And of course chess has a lot of non-English-speaking writers who really know what they are doing. I’d feel like such a schmuck telling a non-native writer “oh hey you left out three the’s, not that it affects the meaning, but it’s there, and it feels dumb compared to the ideas you’re throwing out” but you sort of have to… fortunately there are mechanisms to say “Oh hey if you’re interested in tweaking things, trivial style fix here” over at, say, chessable. One example in particular is This extensive course on the Two Knights where the author is obviously very sharp and has a great writing style and it’s very likely if they’d been native speakers I might have missed a few details.
But with chess in particular, there is little doubt that someone knows more than you (e.g. they are a titled player or have a higher rating) and you’re much more aware that any grammar suggestions are trivial–and it’s hard to balance “let’s get everything as good as it can be” with oh, man, this is a nag after a while. And I guess/think something like a pull request could work well in other cases e.g. “suggested changes for smoother translation, reject or accept as you please.”
I’m talking a lot about chess here but I think there are some examples of how even something misstated says its own thing. For instance here in the first 2 minutes, Baadur Jobava tells Anish Giri “I’m not someone you can ironic” which is technically bad grammar, but it SAYS so much. (87) 2 Chess Grandmasters Got In A “Fight” - YouTube
And the more infamous example is one Russian GM’s rant after being accused (very credibly) of cheating. Now it’s bad form to mock people for trying to be understood in a second language, but when they go on an arching rant, and the evidence is against them, and they slip up … well, the impressive thing is, just how many of the phrases are memorable, if for the wrong reasons!
Content alert for sexism and slightly coarse language: “Chess grandmaster accused of cheating, responds hilariously”
I’ve just been writing a review of Mirror, 4 Twine stories written in Slovakia, and thought really carefully about whether I should mention typos. In the end I did, constructively, but praised the English as strong where appropriate. I tend to take a very relaxed attitude to language, especially where the author has another native tongue. Because that’s not really what the story should be about. But I still feel that as a reviewer it’s helpful for me to point out typos. Not least because the authors may want to fix them, and they can be in many cases a very easy fix. I have phenomenal admiration for IF authors writing in languages other than their native ones. Thank you so much all! And also delighted that there are such flourishing IF communities in languages other than English as well.