I have coached my team to write quite good user stories using gherkin, but their technical stories are still lacking something.
The problem is that when a person of one technical discipline reads the story of a another technical discipline we are finding it very hard to convey enough meaning such that every technical team member can understand it (regardless of whether they know enough to estimate.)
An example, though not specific to our case, would be that of a C# developer without SQL skills writing a story in a team which includes SQL developers without C# skills. (I recognise that the former is unlikely but the extant teams of the latter are common, so please bear with me.)
We would like the story written by the C# developer to be in a grammar understood by the SQL developer. When the SQL developer writes stories we would like the same grammar to be used. I guess that this would be the technical lingua franca.
The user story's lingua franca would be gherkin. What could be the technical story's lingua franca?