aft aft engine room

18:39 Mar 17, 2010 

... I think Florence has interpreted it correctly: one would normally say "to port/starboard in the forward engine room" or "at the aft/forward end of..."

18:09 Mar 17, 2010 

Les autres indications : "at the STB fore engine room, at the PS fore engine room, at the aft fore engine room, at the STB aft engine room, at the PS aft engine room, at the aft aft engine room". Pour l'anglais utilisé, il n'est pas correct dans l'ensemble du texte.

08:39 Mar 17, 2010 

This sounds like rather an odd vessel! Can you tell us what it actually is? It sounds on the face of it as if it has 4 different engine rooms, 2 aft and 2 forward.

If the EN is dodgy, then Florence may well be on the right track with the assumption that they really meant to put 'aft end of the aft engine room'; however, that isn't borne out by the other example with 'aft fore engine room' — are we to assume that it is the 'aft end of the forward engine room'? Note that we'd be probably more likely to say 'forward' than 'fore'.

I suspect that there are in fact aft and forward engine rooms at both the bow and stern of this vessel, and so the first instance is referring to the aft-most one of the engine rooms at the stern, whereas the other occurrence is referring to the aft-most one of the engine rooms at the bow — a scenario that seems, however, highly improbable!

I think the text is suffficently confusing and ambiguous that you may need to give us more of your wider context, or possible the best solution would siply be to "ask the customer"...