Quoting ESL speakers verbatim
Per our conversation in class, regarding quotes and when and when not to quote a source verbatim, I felt the following story did a great job of using quotes to add a lot of color to the story and give the reader a good sense of Raymond Fok’s personality and the hardships he has faced.
The writer quotes Mr. Fok exactly how he sounds, regardless of Fok’s broken English. The writer prepares the reader for Fok’s choppy quote by stating “He has spent 23 years in the United States, but his English remains rudimentary.” The following story was posted in the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/nyregion/stuck-in-bed-for-19-months-at-hospitals-expense.html?pagewanted=1&ref=health
Stuck in Bed, at Hospital’s Expense
“The first two or three months was a hard time,” Mr. Fok said from his hospital bed, the left side of his face still partially frozen from the stroke. He had a tattoo around one arm and two lumps on his bare leg where the dialysis needles removed and then returned his blood three times a week. He has spent 23 years in the United States, but his English remains rudimentary.
In the beginning, he said, “always I thought, how long before I go out? Because when you wake up in the same room every day it’s the same thing, ‘When I can get out?’ It’s always depressing. But day by day, day by day, you don’t need to worry about what will happen, because when you wake up it’s always the same room.”
“My sons hate me,” he said. “They say, ‘Why you bring me here? You don’t have idea. You bring me here; it was a mistake.’ I don’t think it was a mistake. When you come here you see a lot of the world. In Hong Kong you see just a little bit of sky, but here you can see a big sky, a lot of people, different people. It’s the capital of the world, New York. Different people, different cultures. But they don’t like it.”
He added: “I’m not worried about it, because I got to take care of myself, first. And second, when they grow up they will understand. One day they will have families and they will understand, too.”
Yissel, thank you for the story reference and interesting points about maintaining quotes, verbatim in the case of English Language Learners. In addition to your point on representing the style of the speaker's expression, this brings up another idea, that, perhaps, as journalists, we might be able to dialogue and report on the work of our fellow linguists, for example, Dr. Calvin Gidney (Tufts University) who state that in the field, researchers do not look at grammatical errors from one language to the next as a sign of "stupidity" or "lack of education" but rather, as a sign of the natural structural differences between languages. The more that we are, perhaps, able to communicate this to our readers and public, perhaps the more we will be able to use (comprehensible) direct quotes with less risk of presumption and harm to the quoted speakers.
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