The interpreter's mind: mapping the cognitive and ontological shift from bilingualism to interpreting

The question of what distinguishes bilingual competence from professional interpreting ability has long occupied a debated space within cognitive linguistics and interpreting studies. Engaging with the real demands of simultaneous interpreting in a structured academic context made it increasingly clear that the profession requires something well beyond communicative fluency. The interpreter must develop a level of cognitive control, technical precision, and mental endurance that bilingual aptitude alone cannot provide. The distance between being a proficient bilingual and being a trained professional interpreter is, as I hope this thesis will show, not simply a matter of degree but of kind. This realization became the starting point for the present work. The central question I set out to investigate is whether the cognitive profile of a professional interpreter can be understood as a more developed form of bilingualism, or whether the specific demands of interpretive practice produce adaptations that place the interpreter in a genuinely distinct cognitive category.