Conceptual thinking

Fairly on in my time on the translation team, I realised that we had a
different way of looking at text. If I say "the word before" and "the
word after", I am thinking of the order in which I type. If I say "the
word before", it's the word that I typed first. But my colleagues look
at the text more as if it were moving forwards. Imagine that each word
is the front of a train. So they say "the word in front" meaning the
word towards the front of the imaginary train. In my previous sentence,
they would talk about the full stop "in front of" the word "train".

Having realised that there was this clash between our way of thinking, I
used the get-out of just saying for example "the full stop next to the
word 'train'", which worked too. Then just recently I actually found
myself naturally using their way of talking - and then my brain did a
little hiccup, as I tried to figure out what I'd just said! But my
colleagues had understood...!