An example of an idiom used in public science discourse:
"I think, deep down, the bit I love is that sort of Babel fish job, so being a translator in between the worlds of policy and the world of science. By getting them to aticulate their question very, very clearly, I can help them find the bit of science that is actually going to help them do their job better."
Professor Dame Angela McLean (Dept. of Biology & All Souls College, University of Oxford), Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, was being interviewed on an episode of BBC Inside Science.
To refer to a role as being a babel fish job is to use a kind of metaphor which is unlikely to be obvious to anyone not already familiar with this as an idiom. The term is fairly recently adopted as an idiom, only appearing in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio show in 1978.
Read about communicating science through idioms
