Yes. That reaction of your advisor is so annoying! If he doesn’t understand a word, he should just look it up, instead of assuming you made a typo. It makes me think of that translation I had to revise once, where the translator had translated ‘quartile’ as if it said ‘quarter’. I didn’t know that word either, so I looked it up, and there was a perfectly good Dutch translation in the dictionary.
Are the people in your field all/mostly the same nationality, BTW? If not, it’s impossible to take everyone’s deficiencies into account anyway. A Frenchman, a Dutchman and a Spaniard would each misunderstand different words, and they’re all from the same language family.
Another thing is that words that native speakers think of as ‘difficult’ may not be so difficult for non-native speakers. The ‘difficult’ words are often imported from Latin or Greek, and have been imported in many other languages as well. Whereas words that are perfectly ordinary for you may be very difficult for us, like the names for kitchen implements, foodstuffs, articles of clothing, and the like (what do you mean a pocketbook is a woman’s handbag? that one confused me so much, the first time I encountered it).
Yes. That reaction of your advisor is so annoying! If he doesn’t understand a word, he should just look it up, instead of assuming you made a typo. It makes me think of that translation I had to revise once, where the translator had translated ‘quartile’ as if it said ‘quarter’. I didn’t know that word either, so I looked it up, and there was a perfectly good Dutch translation in the dictionary.
Are the people in your field all/mostly the same nationality, BTW? If not, it’s impossible to take everyone’s deficiencies into account anyway. A Frenchman, a Dutchman and a Spaniard would each misunderstand different words, and they’re all from the same language family.
Another thing is that words that native speakers think of as ‘difficult’ may not be so difficult for non-native speakers. The ‘difficult’ words are often imported from Latin or Greek, and have been imported in many other languages as well. Whereas words that are perfectly ordinary for you may be very difficult for us, like the names for kitchen implements, foodstuffs, articles of clothing, and the like (what do you mean a pocketbook is a woman’s handbag? that one confused me so much, the first time I encountered it).