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Subject:RE: What to do??? From:"Bill Lawrence" <scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 27 Oct 2003 13:47:08 -0500
Wade,
The stories I could tell about this...
By the time I left my previous employer, over half of the development
staff (and we're talking about 150 people) were foreign nationals.
Sometimes I would just give up and find someone who could speak the
developer's language, then we would have an interview session where I
could speak English and he or she could speak whatever. That way, I'd
dump the real burden on the translator. One gentleman who barely spoke
or wrote English went to the VP of Engineering to try to stop us from
changing a single word of the incomprehensible error messages he wrote.
The best one was a quiet project I had been given to clean up a "white
paper" written by a particular engineer. It seems he greatly admired
some of the work he'd found in some documentation by a competitor of
ours. In fact he decided to "recycle" it in his own white paper. He
would have probably gotten away with it except that the original author
got his hands on a copy of the white paper. Copyright was a new concept
to this guy.
Sigh.
Bill Lawrence
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bounce-techwr-l-118196 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
[mailto:bounce-techwr-l-
> 118196 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com] On Behalf Of Wade Courtney
> Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 12:59 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: What to do???
>
>
> I just started a job at a new company in Sept. Some of the engineers
> are Russian and they have problems with their English. Ok, no worries,
> but my boss has given them instructions to not worry about grammar,
> spelling, or anything else because I will fix it. Editing these
> documents puts me on the edge of insanity and I have to take a break
> nearly every half a page. How can I tactfully handle telling my boss
> how I feel?
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Wade
>
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