Submissions from Other Languages

Every submission period, we get at least one piece from an author who clearly don't have English as their first language. These stories present an unusual set of questions, since most of them contain grammatical mistakes that we would never put up with from a native English speaker.

Is the language clear enough that we can follow what's happening in the story?
If we literally don't know what it's about, it's impossible to evaluate whether it's good enough to take it anyway.

Was it written in English, written and then translated by hand, or written and then run through Google Translate?
I don't care what language you're writing or submitting in, Google Translate is almost never the right choice for fiction. I could imagine a story using the awkwardness and inaccuracy of automatic translation as part of the story, but it would then have to be obviously good enough that we even read far enough to find out that that was going on.

How much work is it going to be to edit?
This is a question of both how many errors there are and how difficult they will be to fix. Where there are issues with pluralization, or verb tense, there tend to be a lot of them, but they're quick-fixes, individually, and I can work on it while watching The Great British Baking Show. Syntax issues are a little more time consuming, but not hard, especially if I know the grammar of the other language involved. Errors with similar sounding words with similar but not interchangeable meanings are not in any meaningful sense worse errors than the above, but they do require a great deal more thought. With a small staff and deadlines to meet, the extra time and energy cost can work against you, so it's worth taking the time to be sure whether you meant "immersed" or "emerged".

Does someone on the staff have a particular interest in the place you're from or the language you speak?
I studied Russian in college and I'd really like to read more Russian speculative fiction, so you're gonna earn yourself some extra bonus points with me if your first language is Russian, whether you wrote in English or had your work translated. A lot of us have one or more interests like that. Or we might have just been talking about how none of us has seen any speculative fiction from Place, and we wonder what the work being done there is like.

Will editing damage the writing style?
This doesn't come up all that often, but sometimes you get a great story that's written clearly enough to tell how good it is, but is still going to need so much or a kind of editing that it will obscure the writer or narrator's "voice", to the detriment of the piece.

Is it good enough to bother?
No matter where a piece falls on the spectrum of any of these questions, how much leeway there is will always be informed by how much we actually like the piece. I'm willing to do a lot more work for a story I really care about, and conversely less work for something I'm annoyed by or not excited about, even if it wouldn't take much work to get it to a point where it could , technically, be published.