There May Not Be One Moment When Your Brain Stops Translating

One of the most interesting answers from the mental-translation video came from someone who had been abroad about a year.

She came back to the U.S. for work and caught herself converting American prices into the currency she now uses every day.

The direction had completely reversed.

Her new currency wasn’t something she had to translate anymore. It had become the thing she was translating into.

Then there were people at the complete opposite end.

Twenty-plus years and still converting.

Twenty-five years.

One person said thirty years and Celsius still hadn’t really gone away.

And there were a lot of answers somewhere in between.

Someone said linear metric makes sense, but the second you give her square meters, her brain wants square feet.

Other people said money feels normal now while temperature doesn’t.

One person deliberately trained herself to stop converting rather than waiting for it to happen naturally.

A few people seem to switch systems depending on where they are or who they’re talking to.

Which is a lot messier than the question I originally asked.

I was basically wondering: how long does it take before you stop translating everything back?

I’m not sure there is one answer to that.

The part I find more interesting now is why some things seem to stick and others don’t.

Currency may be one of the easier things to replace because you’re actually using it all day.

You get paid in it.

You buy groceries in it.

You go to dinner in it.

At some point, €20 probably has to start meaning something on its own because constantly translating every transaction would be exhausting.

That doesn’t mean it happens for everyone. Some people told me they still use an old currency decades later because the old number is still the better gut-check for whether something feels expensive.

That’s different from not understanding the new currency.

They understand it perfectly well. The old one just still carries the stronger sense of value.

Temperature seems different.

If someone tells me it’s 75 degrees outside, I don’t really process the number first. I already know what that feels like.

Same thing with someone being six feet tall.

Or a 2,000-square-foot house.

Those numbers have years of physical experience attached to them.

Maybe that’s part of why people can become completely comfortable spending euros and still be doing Celsius-to-Fahrenheit math twenty years later.

And square meters may be its own problem.

A few people basically said kilometers make sense, centimeters make sense, and then you give them the area of an apartment and the whole thing falls apart.

I understand that completely.

I can picture 100 feet.

One hundred square meters still makes me stop and do math.

Then there are people who seem to build completely mixed systems.

One set of measurements at home.

Another abroad.

One system for people’s height and another for objects.

One currency for everyday spending and the old one for deciding whether something feels expensive.

That may actually be the most normal outcome.

Not replacing one system with another.

Just ending up with whatever combination your brain finds useful.

I think I was treating this like adaptation eventually meant the old reference points disappear.

I’m less convinced of that now.

And I’m not sure they need to.

If I eventually know what €20 feels like without checking the exchange rate every time, that matters.

If I can understand whether an apartment is small or large without immediately opening a square-meter converter, that would be useful too.

Whether I still look at 20°C and think, “Okay, but what is that actually?” twenty years from now probably doesn’t matter very much.

Maybe the better test isn’t whether you stop translating everything.

It’s whether the things you actually need to understand every day start making sense without much effort.

The rest can stay weird.

There are two things I want to work through next.

Friday: What actually has to happen before this stops being research and Phase 1 really begins for me? There are some very specific things that would have to line up, and I want to get clearer about what those are.

Saturday: I want to hear from people who moved abroad about their first trip back home. Not whether they missed America in general — what they actually noticed when they came back for the first time.

I’m leaving the rest of the week loose for now. The last couple of weeks have been a good reminder that the best material tends to show up while I’m actually working through this.

— Joe