Re: What to do?
I always cringe when someone suggests
teaching an in-house writing class for engineers/developers. Are they
going to teach you engineering next?
Sure. Why not?
One of the best places I've ever worked had periodic Cross-Training/Technology Transfer lunches. Individual staff members, from summer interns to the president of the company, took turns presenting some feature of their areas of expertise. This was followed by a Q&A session that sometimes extended well into the afternoon. The engineers mostly taught programming tips and tricks from their favorite language, or presented problems that had occurred on recent projects and showed how they solved them. I found those sessions extremely helpful in learning vocabulary and concepts that cropped up in the project lifecycle documentation I had to write or edit.
Once the techies got used to seeing me there, they started asking me to do sessions. I did my first one, at the request of several project managers, on how not to screw up the lifecycle doc templates (actually an indoctrination for using MS Word styles that saved me loads of editing time later). The week after a particularly stressful milestone meeting between a project team and a client, I taught The Anatomy of a Useful Use Case, showing them how to translate their developerspeak into language that would make sense to the client.
That kind of cross-training culture takes a long time to organize, though.
As a practical way for the original poster to deal with the immediate situation, I suggest that you find an empty conference room, order a couple buckets of chicken wings and a six-pack of Mountain Dew, and ask a few of the ESL developers to help you figure out how to translate what they *wrote* into what they *meant*. Definitely corral at least two or three of them at the same time. When one developer can't think of an alternate way to phrase what they meant to say, often the other one will chime in with a suggestion that will make the concept clear to you. Once you get a feel for their normal conversational patterns in English, you'll have an easier time interpreting future docs that you receive from them for editing.
Good luck.
--
K@ Kat Nagel
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Re: What to do?: From: Anameier, Christine A - Eagan, MN
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