A discussion of the language problems encountered by professionals working overseas and of how to meet the English language needs of these individuals draws on analyses of native-speaker discourse and on excerpts from non-native-speakers' writing about professional subjects. The topics of the excerpts include management, technology, and forestry. The discussion of the English language needs of this group focuses on vocabulary development, and a framework for isolating and identifying overlooked elements that bridge non-technical and technical vocabulary is presented. Types of bridging vocabulary identified include: (1) transitions (grammatically non-essential expressions that express relationships between ideas); (2) adjectives and adverbs that add evaluative comment or a sense of time, magnitude, quantity, or quality; (3) phrases, particularly noun phrases and some prepositional phrases; and (4) verb structures and their subsets. Bridging vocabulary is not discipline-specific, although some forms of bridging vocabulary may be more prevalent in some fields than in others. Analysis of written non-native-speaker texts indicates that high-intermediate to advanced English learners initially tend to control technical and general vocabulary and then, with difficulty, to use bridging vocabulary. It is concluded that language training for international non-native-English-speaking professionals should address bridging vocabulary. (MSE)