You sent two lines to the project channel: "Let's touch base Thursday, sanity-check the numbers, and see if we can get the ball rolling before things go sideways." Ten minutes later your colleague in São Paulo replied, in English far better than your Portuguese: "Yes to Thursday. But which base do we touch, and what is the ball?"
She was not being literal to tease you. She was being literal to be accurate, because for most of the people who now read English, it is a second language learned from textbooks, and idioms are the last thing to arrive. Rewrite the message for the whole room and it comes out as: "Let's talk briefly on Thursday, check the numbers for obvious errors, and see if we can start before problems appear." Same information, zero tolls. This piece is the second layer on top of plain language writing, which is where any global effort starts.
Idioms, and why they don't travel
An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be assembled from its parts. "Ballpark figure" is not about parks. "Run it up the flagpole" involves neither flags nor poles. Native speakers lean on these constantly because they are compression: three words carrying a paragraph of shared context. The shared context is the catch. Where it is missing, each idiom is a small toll on the reader, and tolls compound.
| What you wrote | What a literal reader sees | What to write instead |
|---|---|---|
| "Let's touch base" | a base, being touched | "Let's talk briefly" |
| "Give me a ballpark figure" | a park, containing a figure | "Give me a rough estimate" |
| "Run it up the flagpole" | a flag, ascending | "Ask senior management" |
| "Low-hanging fruit" | an orchard | "The easiest improvements first" |
| "Think outside the box" | a box | "Consider unusual approaches" |
| "Moving the goalposts" | goalposts, relocating | "Changing the criteria" |
None of these phrases are banned. Idioms are fine when the audience genuinely shares them; a sales team in Chicago can talk ballparks all afternoon. The skill is noticing when the audience changes, because at that moment every unshared phrase stops being compression and becomes a puzzle.
Phrasal verbs, the invisible trap
These are worse than idioms, because they do not look like anything special: everyday verb-plus-particle constructions whose meanings have nothing to do with their parts. Give up. Put off. Run out. Sort out. Go down. A single sentence can stack three: "We'll put off the launch in case supplies run out and the backup servers go down." The Latinate rewrite is longer and transparent: "We will postpone the launch if supplies become scarce or the backup servers fail."
Defaults that do not board the plane
Sports metaphors assume a spectator's childhood, so they sink fastest: baseball exports poorly ("out of left field," "step up to the plate"), and cricket travels even less ("a sticky wicket," "hit for six"). Seasons flip hemispheres, so a "fall semester" begins in spring in Australia. Holidays are local; Black Friday and Boxing Day explain nothing to most of the world, and "the holidays" explain even less.
Humor is the hardest thing to ship. Irony and sarcasm depend on shared cues, and in text, without tone of voice, across cultures, a joke reads as an error and sarcasm reads as an insult. Warmth survives translation far better than wit: courtesy, competence, and clear instructions are appreciated everywhere. Save the jokes for the call, where your face can carry them.
What aerospace figured out decades ago
Aviation maintenance manuals are read worldwide by mechanics under time pressure whose English varies enormously, and a misread instruction can ground an aircraft or worse. The industry's answer was a controlled language: Simplified Technical English, now maintained as ASD-STE100, built on an approved-word list and rules like one word one meaning, a fixed set of verbs for procedures, and short declarative sentences. The rule that matters most to the rest of us: never call the same part two things.
Voice of America has broadcast in Special English since the late 1950s, a register built on a core vocabulary of roughly fifteen hundred common words, so that listeners with school-level English could follow world news without a dictionary. Both systems exist because guessing is expensive when the stakes are real.
You probably cannot impose a controlled vocabulary on your team, and should not try. Steal the two habits that carry most of the benefit. First, a terminology list: the screen is "the dashboard" in every mention, never "the console" or "the panel." Second, one meaning per word: if "enter" means typing, it never means joining. Consistency is what makes text legible to second-language readers and to machine translators, because both process every word as either a known quantity or a guess.
Sentences that survive the machine
A growing share of your global audience meets your text through a translation layer, human or machine, and machines are literal readers with perfect memories and no instinct. They handle short declarative sentences, consistent terminology, and explicit pronouns. They fumble ambiguity:
The rules follow from the example: one idea per sentence, with subject, verb, and object adjacent; no noun stacks ("emergency response time optimization strategy" becomes "a strategy to improve emergency response times"); and a clean source text, because errors multiply when passed through translation. A readability checker shows the sentence-length distribution where translation trouble hides, and a grammar checker catches the agreement slips a translator will faithfully preserve.
The 04/05 problem
Write "04/05/2027" and you have written two dates. The US convention puts the month first; much of the world puts the day first; both readings are correct somewhere. Cross-border mixups over deadlines, expiry dates, and flight times trace back to this one line of text more often than to any language error.
| What you wrote | The two readings | The version that survives |
|---|---|---|
| 04/05/2027 | 4 May, or April 5 | "5 April 2027" or 2027-04-05 |
| The call is at 7:00 | 7 a.m., in whose time zone? | "19:00 CET (1 p.m. New York)" |
| "a billion units" | a thousand million, or the old long-scale million million | Write the digits: 1,000,000,000 |
| "Meet me on the second floor" | two levels up, or one, where floors count from zero | "Meet me on floor 2" or name the department |
Decimal commas and thousand separators swap across borders too: half of Europe writes 1,5 for what US English writes as 1.5. The fixes are boring and perfect. Write the month as a word, or use the ISO year-month-day format, 2027-04-05, which is unambiguous everywhere and sorts correctly in any file listing. Name the time zone, every time. For "billion," write the digits. None of this takes talent. It takes remembering that your formats were not the world's defaults; they were your village's.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I avoid all idioms, always?
No. Register should match the actual audience. When the room is genuinely international, trade the idiom for its meaning; when it is not, do not perform clarity for nobody. The skill is noticing when the audience has changed, not memorizing a banned list.
How can I tell if my text works internationally?
Read it once as a literalist and flag every phrase that does not mean what its words say. Better, ask a colleague who learned English as a second language to mark the sentences they had to reread; those markings are gold. Running the text through machine translation and back exaggerates the problem but will surface fragile constructions.
Do I need a controlled vocabulary?
Almost certainly not a formal one. A one-page terminology list, with preferred terms, banned synonyms, and short definitions, captures most of the benefit for most teams. If you write safety-critical instructions, look at ASD-STE100 properly.
Which spelling standard should I use, British or American?
Either, consistently: one standard per publication, because mixing varieties reads as sloppiness in every variety. Our British vs. American spelling guide covers the decision, and a spelling checker set to one variant catches drift.
Isn't this condescending to non-native speakers?
The reverse. Fluency includes idiom and register, and asking you to skip them is not lowering the bar for readers; it is declining to test them on it. Native readers under time pressure benefit from every one of these simplifications too.
The literal reader pass
Before you send the next important message to an international audience, reread it once as a reader with a dictionary and no context. Mark every phrase whose meaning is not built from its words, every "it" with two possible parents, every date that could be two different days. Replace them with words that mean what they say. It costs about three minutes, and it is the cheapest localization on earth: one text, every reader, no translation bill.