Well, let me add my well-balanced and wise opinion.
I have no specific reason to defend Danny; on the contrary, sometimes he made remarks on some of my most self-centered posts that I believed to be fairly superficial, so if anything I should maybe be holding a tiny grudge toward him.
I have, of course, tons of specific reasons to defend rahvin, because he is my friend; but I am not beyond seeing where he can be wrong, as I hope that most of you will acknowledge, and as will be clear in the following.
My thoughts on this whole issue are very much of a professional nature, in the sense that after all I am an economist who worked a lot with data on developing countries, and I guess that I can derive some good hunches from the so-called "conditional convergence" theory.
Danny lives in Costa Rica. So the question we have to ask ourselves (and he has to ask himself, too), if we want to comment on his English, is not "Would he make a wonderful translator of literary English?" but "Would he make a good translator in his country?".
I know for a fact that the educational attainment of the average Costa Rican is way lower than his, and I do honestly believe that he could be useful to his prospective Costa Rican employer much more than most of his contenders. Note that I am not saying this in a condescending way, nor with any racism intended toward Costa Ricans: I am trying to say that before judging his effectiveness you have to bear in mind his context, which is one where probably he is one of the best young people who study languages, also considering the fact that he's taking more than one language.
So,
should he stay in his country, Danny will be a good translator, he will probably get a good pay in relative terms, and he will contribute to the furthering of commercial relations of his country with the rest of the world. To me, this is all well and good, and for anyone who is conversant with economic theory this is also one of the reasons why Costa Rica might have a future generation of translators that can be competitive with translators who come from high-income countries.
Of course if Danny, say, went to Sweden or Holland he could hardly compete with locally-bred budding translators. If he doesn't acknowledge this (and from the little I know about him, he might not be inclined to acknowledge it), then he's delusional. This doesn't make him any less of a good Costa Rican translator; he's just a delusional Costa Rican translator.
This was to say that I don't think we should be piling up against someone without considering the circumstances of his country of origin, that is if we are trying to estimate his chances at success in a strictly professional capacity.
Now that this is out of the way, I do not like the "phorum", the "ye" and all that business more than any of you do. My only hope is that Danny will grow out of it: I can distinctly remember that I had a fascination with low-level slang when I was a teenager, and maybe the level of English I could have at 16 is the one that is expected from Danny in uni (for which we cannot blame him). I know for a fact that I grew out of it; we don't know if he will, and here I can only give my heartfelt advice to him to do so, but this is neither here not there.
Another thing I do not like one iota is the racial slurs that Danny thought wise to throw against Italians. While I do acknowledge that a thorough knowledge of English in this country is more or less limited to professionals in the field and a few aficionados, I'm not in favor of any generalization, as I said in the past. So please, Danny, kindly refrain from such aggressive language.
More reflections on the theme would include the fact that Danny sometimes does not seem to be aware of his own limitations, language-wise. But my conclusion on this is "Who cares", which of course does not mean that people who are irritated by his attitude should not say so.
@Taliesin: while I commend you on what I deem a very bold statement about rahvin, I do not see any elitism or intolerance in what he said. He was just inviting a forum member not to boast in a loud and obnoxious way about imaginary achievements. You retorted by pointing out that rahvin might be more or less taking out his frustrations as an underachiever, and I say "Wow" at that because I would never dare to say so (incidentally, there are two reasons why I would not: one in the rational domain, i.e. because such a statement rests on an assumption of unique paradigms which, surprising or not, I do not share; one in the emotional domain, i.e. I just would not feel it helps any). But I don't think there is such a strong connection. You can label me more or less any possible insulting thing except "underachiever", yet I do not really like all the flaunting and boasting and parading evident from Danny's post. I like the fact that he's trying to achieve something, but I do not think that being so air-headed about it is going to help him. A good habit of discipline and self-criticism is going to help him, and he would be helped, in my humble opinion, by being slightly more thick-skinned.
As for some random festivals of hypocrisy going on in the here and there of the whole dialogue, I will just not comment, because I don't want to be sick.
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