Whose Grammar Is Standard
A copy editor in Lima once corrected a testimony to remove what she called "Quechua interference" from the Spanish, meaning the word order a woman named Reyna had actually spoken in, the order her first language gave her, silently replaced with the order Spanish grammars call correct.
Nobody told the copy editor to think of Spanish word order as the neutral baseline against which Reyna's sentence was an error. She had absorbed it the way most of us absorb which grammar counts as standard: not as an argument won, but as a fact of the furniture, present before either of us arrived in the room. Ask yourself, honestly, which grammar you correct toward without noticing you are correcting, and you have found the standard you did not choose so much as inherit.
The default grammar audit
I run what I call a default grammar audit on any manuscript before it goes to print: I go through every place an editor has marked a construction as wrong, and for each one I ask a single question, whether the marked construction is actually ungrammatical or whether it is grammatical in a different language pattern that the speaker's Spanish or English carries. These are not the same failure, and treating them as the same failure is how a testimony gets steadily corrected into a grammar the speaker never used and would not recognise as her own sentence.
Reyna's sentence, in translation, read "the water, it came fast, my house." Object first, then a comment on it, then the location, an order that is entirely regular in Quechua and would be marked by most Spanish or English copy editors as fragmented, as if the speaker had lost her thread. She had not lost her thread. She was using a word order her first language treats as unremarkable, front loading the thing that mattered most, the water, before saying anything else about it. Correcting it to "the water came fast into my house" is not a grammar fix. It is a translation of her sentence into a different sentence, one that happens to share most of the same words.
What I do instead
Where the audit finds a construction that is regular in the speaker's first language but irregular in the language she is being published in, I keep it, and I do so without a footnote apologising for it, because a footnote there would say the sentence needs excusing rather than explaining. Where the audit finds an actual slip, a word left out that neither language would supply, I fix it, because that is not a grammar difference, it is an accident of speech that the speaker herself would want corrected if she reread the page.
The distinction sounds fine in principle and is hard in practice, because most copy editing training does not teach you to ask which grammar you are enforcing, only how to enforce the one you were trained in, and that training presents itself as neutral competence rather than as one grammar among several with the institutional weight to call itself standard. I have made the wrong call in both directions: kept a construction that was, on closer listening, actually a slip, and corrected one that was, on closer listening, entirely deliberate. The audit does not make the calls for me. It only forces me to make each one on purpose instead of by reflex.
The disagreement worth having
The strongest objection is that Reyna's testimony reaches more readers, and reaches them with less friction, once it is rendered in standard Spanish, and that friction on the sentence level costs her the wider audience her account deserves. That is true, and I do not think it is a small cost. What I do not accept is that the friction is a defect in her sentence rather than a fact about the reader's unfamiliarity with a grammar that is, for millions of speakers, not exotic at all. The correction does not remove friction. It moves the friction from the reader, who could have learned to read a slightly unfamiliar order, onto Reyna, who is asked to sound like someone she is not so that a stranger's grammar can remain comfortable in her sentence.
I have sat with editors who found this objection decisive and I understand why. A book nobody finishes helps nobody, least of all the woman whose account it was supposed to carry. But the fix they reach for treats her sentence as the variable to adjust, when the reader's unfamiliarity is just as adjustable, and cheaper to ask for, since it costs the reader a few extra seconds of attention rather than costing Reyna her own word order.