This study focuses on three levels of professional competence: novices (4), competent bilinguals (4), and professional translators (4). The process data are analysed in terms of external processing (time spent) and internal processing (e.g. units of analysis and “problem solving activities”); the quality of the translations was also assessed. The findings show that professionals do not necessarily produce the best quality translations. Instead, quality seems to be the outcome of the amount of time and effort invested in the task: the processes leading to the best results take more time and require more processing effort than the less successful processes. The author terms her finding as the “translation-does-not-get-easier” phenomenon.