Programmers are from Mars, Customers are from Venus
Earlier today I found myself scavenging the PLOP site hoping to find some of the final drafts of the papers presented at PLOP 07 this year… no luck, but I did come across last years and, coincidentially, Martin, Noble & Biddle’s paper “Programmers are from Mars, Customers are from Venus: A practical guide for customers on XP Projects“, of which I happened to attend a session on at Agile 2007.
Geek Interpreter is one I find pretty valuable… although as developers we should strive to develop an ubiquitous language with our customer to describe domain details, sometimes we still let a little something leak through… and this is even more evident when dealing with legacy systems. Having a non technical person around to kind of help ground the conversation and keep everyone in line is beneficial. Just remember… a geek interpreter is NOT a substitute for programmer/customer communication, nor are they a buffer to “gather requirements from the customer and give them to the developers” either. They’re there to keep developers from saying at the beginning of the meeting…
“H3Y D00DZ, L3TZ C0D3 UP SUM ST0R1Z!!”
It’s well worth a read if, like me, you’re hoping to improve our working relationship with your customer. 
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