One of the really convenient things about working on a large international project is that typically the common language is English. It might be possible to have an all German project in parts of Europe, an all Spanish project in parts of North or South America or even all French project in Africa or some parts of Europe.
Yet when you have a project that covers the globe, you usually end up with English as the common language. My German was limited but the good news was that all meetings and project documentation would be in English.
To ensure we were adding quality to the project, the documents where reviewed by no less than three different groups. The first being other developers within the group, the second group was the project IT department and the last was an auditing firm.
English being my native language may have helped with the writing but getting the documents approved was a different matter. The other developers wanted more details on what my work did and the auditors wanted more information explaining about finance. Try as I might, I was never quite able to explain that I should only be explaining my program and financial terms should be learned elsewhere. If you were looking for sheer length then my documents were doing the job, well, except as far as the auditing group was concerned.
It was slightly above my pay grade but my manager was interfacing with IT and there was a problem with the quality of the documentation, well, specifically my documentation. Freddy, the person who was in charge of that department had the comment that these documents where written using “English for run aways”.
If the company is large enough, it should be possible to get a couple of impartial people to review and report on the content. The project hired a special person who had an understanding of both finance and English to report on the documentation.
In the end, the review showed that although the documents may not have been timeless literature, but they were not written by run aways.