In Austria, Kreuz means two things. A cross, the two perpendicular sticks. And your back, because that is where Jesus is said to have carried his. Which is why Austrians call back pain Kreuzweh.

So when I moved to the Netherlands, I asked a Dutch friend whether kruis (the Dutch word for cross) also had two meanings. She said yes.

For the next six years, whenever anyone asked how I was doing, I said I was fine, just a bit of kruispijn today. In work meetings. At dinner parties. To clients, colleagues and friends.

Nobody ever responded. Not once. Someone else would mention a mild headache and get real sympathy, the full wat erg voor je, wat goed dat je toch bent gekomen (in English: how awful for you, what good of you to come anyway). I would report serious back pain and get nothing at all. I complained to my husband about how pitiless the Dutch were towards foreigners. I had a theory, and six years of consistent data supporting it.

Then I was watching a Belgian crime show. A woman walked into a police station to report that a man had touched her kruis. My first thought was that Belgians are as prudish as their reputation suggests, because I pat people on the back all the time. Then the show cut to a flashback of what had actually happened to her.

Kruis does have a second meaning in Dutch. It is the area between your legs.

Both meanings were true. My friend answered my question correctly. I just never asked which second meaning, and for six years I told half of the Netherlands that my crotch hurt.

This is the risk in translating sayings into English, or into any other language you work in.

But it is still worth doing. Your expressions are one of the few things that survive the move into another language with your personality still attached. They make you memorable in a room where everyone is speaking careful, flat, neutral English.

You simply need four words in front of them.

Why you stopped sounding like yourself in English

You have probably read the last two paragraphs and drawn the safe conclusion: do not risk it. That is exactly what most engineers do, and it costs more than it saves.

You did not lose your personality in English. You reduced yourself on purpose.

It happens for a sensible reason. Every expression you would use in your own language is a risk you cannot calculate. You do not know whether it exists in English, whether it means what you think, or whether it will make you sound strange in front of a client. So you stop using them. What comes out instead is correct, careful and flat. Safe English.

I did the same thing in Dutch for years. I tried so hard to be perfect that I forgot I was Austrian.

Rebecca van Raamsdonk, who runs a Dutch language school for advanced learners, has watched this from the teacher's side for over a decade. She told me about students who would discuss philosophy and politics with her for an hour in class, then stand at a Dutch party and say almost nothing. Not a vocabulary problem. Not a grammar problem. They had the language and left it in the room.

The gap is not between what you know and what you can say. It is between what you can say and what you allow yourself to say.

Being unclear about your accent is a separate question, and I have written about that in "does your accent hold you back at work" This one is not about how you sound. It is about what you are willing to put into the sentence.

The trap is not the strange translation. It is the one that lands.

So you allow yourself the expression. That is the right instinct, and it is where the actual risk starts.

A saying that translates badly is a small problem. Your colleague looks puzzled, asks what you mean, you explain, everyone moves on. The conversation repairs itself.

The dangerous one is the saying that is understood perfectly fine.

A client once asked me in Dutch how I was doing. I told him I was walking next to my shoes: Ik loop naast mijn schoenen. In Austria we say nebn di Schuach laffn (in standard German, neben den Schuhen laufen), and it means you are completely unfocused that day. Tired, distracted, not functioning properly. In your shoes, you walk through your day comfortably. Next to your shoes, everything is slightly off.

He said: "That is not a nice thing to say about yourself."

I said: "But what if it is true?"

Naast je schoenen lopen already exists in Dutch. It means you have started to think too highly of yourself. He heard me announce that I was arrogant that day, and then defend it.

Same image. Same verb, near enough. Completely different meaning.

The closer two languages are, the more dangerous your expressions become, because a bad translation announces itself and a good one does not.

German and Dutch share the picture. Dutch and English share more than most engineers expect. So the sentence arrives sounding native, nobody asks a question, and the misunderstanding sits there. My client caught it inside one conversation because he said something. Kruispijn went uncorrected for six years because nobody did.

Silence is not confirmation that you were understood.

The four words that make it safe

Here they are.

"We have a saying..."

That is the whole technique. You say it before the expression, not after.

We have a saying in Austria: you walk next to your shoes. Then you explain what it means, in one line.

Four words change what the listener does with the next sentence. Without them, your colleague hears a claim and treats it as information. With them, they hear that an image is coming and that it belongs to another language. They stop parsing it as ordinary English and start listening for a picture.

This is why it protects you in the case that hurt me twice. If the expression happens to exist in the other language with a different meaning, the flag makes the mismatch visible instead of silent. Your colleague can say "we have that one too, but here it means something else." Now you both know. That conversation takes eight seconds and saves you six years.

It also does something the safe version cannot. It hands your colleague an invitation. In my experience the answer is almost never a polite nod. It is "wait, what does that mean?" followed by three other people telling you the version from their own language.

The flag turns a risk into a question, and a question into a conversation.

A few working variations, depending on the room:

• We have a saying in Poland...
• There is an expression in Portuguese for exactly this...
• This will sound strange in English, but in Hungarian we say...

That third one is worth keeping in your pocket. It gives you permission to be imprecise, which is the thing most engineers will not give themselves.

One rule: give the meaning immediately. Do not make people guess. An expression you have to be asked to explain has cost the room time instead of adding something to it.

On an international project, nobody owns the English anyway

There is a quiet assumption behind the flattening: that English belongs to someone else, and you are a guest in it.

On most engineering projects that is simply not true. Think about the last international meeting you sat in. A German project manager, a Spanish architect, a Polish calculator, a Dutch client. Everybody in that room is working in their second, third or fourth language. Everybody is translating from something. The English in that meeting does not belong to a native speaker, because there often is not one.

Which means your expression is not an intrusion into somebody else's language. It is one more thing arriving in a shared one.

I tested this without meaning to. Just before recording a podcast episode with a Dutch teacher who runs a school for advanced learners, I used an Austrian expression on her: walking around the cross with the church. It describes making something far more complicated than it needs to be. In Catholic Austria the cross gets carried around the church in a procession. Carry the church around the cross instead and you have done a great deal of work for no reason.

That one does not exist in Dutch. She had never heard it. She brought it up again once we were recording, unprompted, and said she liked it because she could see the image.

That is the difference between the two outcomes in this article. Kruispijn had no flag and no explanation, so it produced six years of silence. The church and the cross came with both, so it produced a picture in someone else's head that was still there twenty minutes later.

A flagged expression is memorable. An unflagged one is a risk. The four words are the entire difference.

There is a practical argument here too, beyond being liked. If you work on international projects, the ability to explain a concept through an image is not decoration. It is what you do every time you tell a client why a foundation needs more time than they budgeted for. You already have this skill in your own language. The flag is what lets you carry it across.

Where this does not belong

Everything above applies to people talking to each other. It does not apply to your documents.

Keep translated expressions out of specifications, work instructions, drawings, method statements, safety documentation, test reports and anything a contractor will follow without you in the room. The reason is not style. It is that written technical English has to survive being read by someone tired, in a hurry, in their fourth language, possibly through machine translation, with nobody available to ask what you meant.

An image is exactly the wrong thing to put in that sentence. Technical English exists to remove the second possible reading, and an expression from your own language adds one.

The same goes for the moments in speech where precision is the point. Not the meeting, but the sentence inside the meeting where you state a load, a tolerance, a deadline or a risk. Tell the story, use the picture, then give the number plainly.

Use your expressions to build the relationship. Use plain, precise English to carry the information.

That split is most of what I teach. If you want the written half in more detail, the "Technical English Guidelines" cover the rules for documentation, and they are free.

Bring the rest of yourself across

There is a version of you that is funnier, sharper and more direct in your own language than you have ever been in English. Most engineers I work with do not notice this, because from the inside, safe English feels like correct English. It is only when someone points at the gap that you hear it.

That is a lot of what a coaching session actually does. Not grammar drills. Working out which parts of you are getting left behind at the language border, and how to bring them across without ending up in a six-year misunderstanding about your back.

If you want to talk it through, book a free 15-minute call. No preparation needed.

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