On Tuesday, September 03, 2013 17:07:02 Melinda Shore wrote:
On 9/3/13 6:50 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
I think that is a given without having pre-emptive blame assignment in the
text.
*Blame*?
I know that I've inadvertently used regional idioms that were hard
for non-native speakers to understand and I've been grateful when
it's been pointed out. Trying to figure out where things get confusing
and correcting that is a net positive for the organization.
Characterizing that process as "blame" is not.
We're supposed to be engineers. Let's fix stuff.
I agree, but we're people too. It's been my experience that if a code of
conduct assigns primary responsibility for something to one party (in this
case the native English speaker), it will later get used as a hammer whether
it was intended as such or not.
I agree that trying to figure things out is a net positive. What I want to
avoid is someone making excuses claiming that since they aren't a native
speaker it's somebody else's problem to understand them.
The responsibility to attempt to communicate clearly is equal. Someone more
fluent in English may have more tools at their disposal and may be able to
contribute to the resolution of the problem more extensively, but that doesn't
given them any more or less inherent burden.
Scott K