After returning from a vacation, many interpreters experience something they rarely admit out loud. The first few calls feel different. A familiar medical term suddenly takes an extra second to retrieve. A phrase that would normally come effortlessly seems just out of reach. The conversation still flows, the interpretation remains accurate, but something feels slightly off. For interpreters who have spent years, or even decades, refining their skills, these moments can be surprisingly unsettling.
The immediate reaction is often self doubt. Have I become rusty? Am I forgetting terminology? Is this simply part of getting older? Some even wonder whether they have lost the sharpness that once made interpreting feel almost automatic. Yet these concerns raise an interesting question. If experience is supposed to make us better, why would seasoned interpreters ever struggle with words they have used thousands of times before?
The answer lies not in forgetting, but in understanding how the human brain works. Contrary to popular belief, memory does not function like a filing cabinet where information is neatly stored and instantly available whenever we need it. Memory is dynamic. The ease with which we retrieve information depends not only on whether we know it, but also on how recently and how frequently we have used it. A word that has been accessed every day for months becomes highly active in our mental lexicon. After several weeks away from interpreting, that same word remains stored in memory, but it may no longer be as immediately accessible.
Psychologists often describe this in terms of lexical retrieval and retrieval fluency. The vocabulary has not disappeared, but the speed of accessing it has temporarily slowed. This is very different from forgetting. It is more like taking a familiar road that has become slightly overgrown because it has not been travelled for a while. The destination has not changed, but the journey may take a little longer until the path becomes well worn again.
This idea is supported by research from several different fields. Cognitive psychologists have long demonstrated that complex skills become less automatic after periods of nonuse, a phenomenon commonly referred to as skill decay. Studies involving pilots, surgeons, emergency responders, musicians, and athletes consistently show that highly trained professionals often experience a brief decline in performance after time away from practice. Importantly, this decline is usually temporary. Once regular practice resumes, performance quickly returns to its previous level because the underlying knowledge and expertise were never lost.
Interpreting deserves to be included in that conversation because it is one of the most cognitively demanding language professions. Every interpretation requires the brain to listen, comprehend, retain information in working memory, suppress interference from another language, retrieve appropriate terminology, monitor accuracy, and produce natural speech, all within a matter of seconds. These processes occur so rapidly that experienced interpreters often forget just how much mental coordination is taking place beneath the surface.
Years of experience gradually transform many of these processes into automatic responses. Medical terms, common phrases, and familiar sentence patterns become so well practised that they seem to appear without conscious effort. That automaticity is one of the defining characteristics of expertise. However, automatic does not mean permanent. Like any highly developed skill, it benefits from regular use. A period away from interpreting allows those neural pathways to become slightly less active, making the first few calls back feel more mentally demanding than usual.
Research on bilingualism provides another piece of the puzzle. Studies have shown that bilingual speakers constantly adjust the activation levels of their languages depending on which language they are using most frequently. During a vacation, an interpreter may spend considerably less time switching rapidly between languages or may primarily use only one language in daily life. When work resumes, the brain must once again coordinate two languages simultaneously while managing the additional cognitive demands of interpretation. It is therefore unsurprising that language retrieval may initially feel slower before returning to its usual efficiency.
Many interpreters mistakenly view these brief moments as evidence that something is wrong. In reality, they may simply reflect the remarkable adaptability of the human brain. Rather than keeping every possible skill operating at maximum readiness all the time, the brain allocates its resources according to what is currently needed. When interpreting becomes part of daily work again, those specialized networks are reactivated remarkably quickly.
Perhaps this explains why experienced interpreters often report that the first several calls after a vacation feel slightly awkward, while the calls that follow seem to flow naturally again. Nothing magical has happened during those few hours. The interpreter has not relearned medical terminology or suddenly become more knowledgeable. Instead, the brain has resumed the highly specialized patterns of retrieval and language control that had merely been resting during the break.
There is also an important emotional aspect to consider. Professional interpreters tend to hold themselves to exceptionally high standards. Because they understand the importance of every word, they notice even the smallest hesitation. A patient or healthcare provider may never recognise that an interpreter paused for half a second before producing the perfect term, but the interpreter remembers it for the rest of the day. This heightened self awareness is often a sign of professionalism rather than incompetence, yet it can also make perfectly normal cognitive processes feel like personal failures.
Perhaps our expectations are the real problem. We often imagine that expertise should eliminate hesitation altogether, as though years of experience should transform the brain into a flawless machine. The scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Even the most experienced professionals experience temporary reductions in retrieval fluency after periods of nonuse. The difference is not that experts never hesitate. The difference is that they recover smoothly, maintain the flow of communication, and trust that their fluency will return as they settle back into their work.
The next time you return from a vacation and find yourself searching for a word you know you have interpreted hundreds of times before, remember that your brain is not necessarily telling you that you have forgotten it. It is reminding you that expertise is not defined by constant perfection, but by the ability to reactivate complex skills when they are needed. In many ways, that may be an even more impressive achievement than never hesitating at all.
References
Anderson, J. R. (1982). Acquisition of Cognitive Skill. Psychological Review, 89(4), 369–406.
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge University Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. MIT Press.
Moser Mercer, B. (2005). Remote Interpreting: Issues of Multi tasking and Cognitive Load. Interpreting, 7(1), 73–94.
Paradis, M. (2004). A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. John Benjamins.
Schmid, M. S. (2011). Language Attrition. Cambridge University Press.
