translating yourself: thinking in one language, speaking in another

The person who arrives a second late

Picture a senior accountant in Kozhikode. At home, in Malayalam, she is the funny one. She tells stories at family dinners that make her uncles laugh until they cough. She can tease, console and argue in the same breath.

At work, on calls with the head office in Dubai, she is described as "very professional". Precise. Reliable. A little reserved. Her colleagues would be surprised to hear she is funny.

She is not hiding. She is translating. By the time her joke has been carried from Malayalam into English, checked for grammar and timed for the moment, the moment has passed. So she stops trying to bring the joke. She brings the numbers instead, because numbers travel well.

Our coaches meet some version of her all the time: a sales manager in Chennai who is warm in Tamil and stiff in English, an engineer in Lucknow who argues brilliantly in Hindi and agrees too quickly in English, a young lawyer in Sharjah who is sharp in Arabic and careful in English. These are illustrations, not real people. But the experience behind them is common, and it deserves to be taken seriously.

What is lost in the crossing

The most obvious cost is time. Every sentence that has to be built rather than simply spoken arrives a little late, and conversation is unforgiving about timing.

The second cost is texture. Humour, irony, affection and gentle disagreement live in tiny choices of word and rhythm. These are the things that are hardest to translate on the fly, so they are the first to be left behind. What crosses safely is content. What often stays at home is character.

The third cost is the most painful: being underestimated. Colleagues meet the translated version and assume it is the whole person. The accountant's quiet competence is noticed. Her wit, her judgement about people and her ability to calm a room are not, because they never make it into English.

We want to say this clearly, because people who live with this cost often blame themselves for it. It is not a sign of low intelligence, and it is not a sign that your English is lacking. It is what happens when a whole person tries to pass through a narrow door at speed.

What is gained in the crossing

Here is the part that surprises people. Thinking in one language and speaking in another can also give you something.

In 2012, Boaz Keysar, Sayuri Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An published a series of experiments in Psychological Science on what they called the foreign-language effect. Classic decision biases, such as being swayed by whether the same choice is described as a gain or a loss, were reduced when people made the decisions in a foreign language they had learned, rather than in their native tongue. People were also less averse to losses when the bets were presented in their second language. The researchers suggested that a foreign language gives people more distance, both emotional and mental, from the problem in front of them.

The effect has been studied a good deal since. A 2022 meta-analysis led by Nicola Del Maschio, pooling results from many experiments, found the effect to be real but small, and quite variable from study to study. Most of the experiments used written moral dilemmas, often in English as the second language, so we should be cautious about stretching the findings too far. We do not take from this that people decide better in English. We take something gentler: a second language can put a little air between you and the heat of a moment.

Our coaches see a version of this in practice. Some people find it easier to give hard feedback, set a boundary or decline a request in English than in their first language. The words feel less loaded. A manager who cannot bring herself to say "no" to her uncle in Hindi may be able to say "I'm not able to take that on this quarter" to a client with surprising calm. That distance is not coldness. Used well, it is composure.

Are we different people in different languages?

People often tell us, half joking, that they have an English personality. There is some research that takes this seriously.

A 2006 study by Nairán Ramírez-Esparza and colleagues gave Spanish and English bilinguals the same personality questionnaire in both languages. In English, their answers came out higher on extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness, in line with the typical differences between the two cultures. But, as a summary of the study by the British Psychological Society put it, people did not change places: the extraverts stayed extraverts, and the overall profile held. The authors linked the shift to what they called cultural frame switching, where language acts as a cue to a different set of cultural habits.

So the honest answer is: you are not two different people. You may be the same person leaning in slightly different directions, depending on which language is holding the door open.

Keeping yourself in both

If there is a cost and a gain, the question becomes practical. How do we keep the gain, the composure and distance, without paying the full cost, the loss of humour and warmth?

Our coaches have a few convictions about this.

Bring one piece of home with you. You do not have to translate your whole personality at once. Pick one thing that is truly you, a kind of joke, a way of greeting people, a story you love to tell, and practise carrying it into English until it arrives on time.

Prepare the warm sentences, not just the technical ones. Most professionals prepare their data in English and leave warmth to chance. Flip that. Your numbers will look after themselves. Prepare how you will thank someone, tease gently or say you are proud of the team.

Let your first language help. Sometimes the best English sentence starts as a phrase from home. "In Malayalam we have a saying for this..." is a perfectly good way to begin. It shows people where your thinking comes from, and it often lands better than a borrowed English idiom.

Notice which self you need. If a decision is emotional, it may help to think it through in your second language as well as your first. If a moment needs warmth, let your first-language self lead and find the English afterwards.

A whole person, in two languages

The accountant in Kozhikode does not need to become a different person at work. She needs her joke to arrive on time, now and then, so that her colleagues meet more of her. Nothing about her English has to be erased for that to happen. Not her accent, not her rhythm, not the occasional sentence built in the shape of Malayalam.

Translation, in the end, is not just a loss. It is an act of care: the effort of carrying something from one world into another so that someone else can receive it. People who do it every day are doing something quietly remarkable. They deserve to be met as their whole selves, and they deserve to show up that way.

Sources

1. Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An, The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases, Psychological Science, 23(6), 661 to 668, 2012. doi.org/10.1177/0956797611432178
2. Nicola Del Maschio, Federico Crespi, Francesca Peressotti, Jubin Abutalebi and Simone Sulpizio, Decision-making depends on language: A meta-analysis of the Foreign Language Effect, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 25(4), 617 to 630, 2022. doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921001012
3. Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Samuel D. Gosling, Verónica Benet-Martínez, Jeffrey P. Potter and James W. Pennebaker, Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching, Journal of Research in Personality, 40(2), 99 to 120, 2006. doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2004.09.001
4. Christian Jarrett, Change your personality, learn a new language, British Psychological Society Research Digest, 2006. www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/change-your-personality-learn-new-language

Published by The Full Stop, the journal of Brightside English, in the Thought Studies series. This is an essay: an argument and an experiment of the imagination, not research. Reviewed by a Brightside senior coach. Corrections: see our editorial standard.