English for technical trainers

For engineers to whom English is a foreign language, it can be difficult to avoid misunderstandings. I am thinking of three examples that I encountered:

1) In a meeting with Americans and French people, the French repeatedly explained that: "actually, the situation is..". Now in French, 'actuellement' means, "at the moment" and can carry an implication that things might change. But the Americans obviously took 'actually' to be more of firm statement like 'in fact' - leading to some talk at cross-purposes.

2) A Japanese engineer explained to me that his company use the word 'method' to describe what in C used to be called a 'function', because the word function has many meanings (for example, functionality as opposed to a software subroutine) whereas the word 'method' did not. (??) Of course to a native English speaker, 'method' also has other meanings (eg 'the way someting is done' ) so the reasoning does not stand.

3) In an online discussion involving Microsoft 'usability' experts, someone asked if there were to be language-specific versions of an API - because some of the API names were confusing due to other meanings in Portugese (I think it was Portugese).The Microsoft people agreed that they did not think of other cultural usages when designing AI naming conventions.

These made me think that there is room for some training that would be based on what English to choose, to avoid misunderstndings when people reading do not have English as a first language. For example one might recommend:

- identify a subset of English where meanings are rather clear and unambiguous
- attach a glossary of definitions so everybody can be clear about what is intended
- identify words or usages that are especially subject to misinterpretation

To do this would involve learning about other laguages, but also drawing on experience from engineers where language has in fact been misunderstood. It would make an interesting project.