ESL is an acronym that means "English as a second language." So expect ESL dictators to sound everything but American.
The problem lies when the speaker tries to speak with an American accent. They more often than not end up badly mispronouncing words. They try to speak faster thinking that it was better to do so, perhaps in an effort to emulate their native American colleagues' manner of talking.
Honestly, it would be much easier if the ESL dictator syllabicated each word deliberately rather than slurring the syllables like most Americans who sound like they're lazy to pronounce the words and squeeze a five-syllable word into one syllable. A far cry from your favorite Fox News reporter, I must say.
One of my favorite ESL dictators is a male physician of Hispanic descent. He usually comes up with a decent dictation even while retaining his native accent: the long and overly emphasized letter 'R' similar to the way most Japanese would pronounce the letter 'L.' My major problem here is his grammar. I once tried to correct it, and my boss told me not to because it will offend him. Then I checked one of my edited files; the editor had apparently corrected the physician's grammar.
There goes another of my woes. The editors themselves do not agree on a single standard even if they worked on the same doctor under the same account. I will blog about it in a future post.
