Short answer: you stop translating by giving your brain direct practice thinking in English, instead of practicing the translation itself.
When you build a sentence by thinking it first in your own language and then converting it, that conversion step costs real seconds, and real conversation does not wait. The fix is not more grammar or more vocabulary, since you likely already have enough of both. It is a specific daily habit called life narration: describing what you are doing, out loud, in simple English, in the moment, with no translating and no pressure. Done regularly, it retrains your brain to reach for English objects and ideas directly instead of routing everything through your first language first. It is a habit you built by accident years ago, which means it is a habit you can unbuild on purpose.
A translated sentence takes a long trip before it reaches your mouth. First it is an idea. Then your brain puts that idea into your first language. Then it hunts for the English words, one at a time. Then it tries to put them in the right order. Then, finally, you speak. Five steps for one sentence, and every step adds a fraction of a second. That is the pause people notice, and it is the reason the conversation often moves on before your sentence is ready.
A fluent speaker's version has two steps: idea in English, then speak. They are not smarter or more talented than you, their brain has simply stopped needing the middle step. That is the entire target here, cutting the trip from five steps down to two.
More vocabulary gives your brain more material to search through mid-translation, which can genuinely make the pause worse, not better. The gap is not a knowledge problem. You already have enough words to describe your morning, your commute, your kitchen. The gap is that those words are still filed under your first language, and your brain has to go looking for the English version every single time. Closing it means practicing direct English thoughts, not collecting more raw material to translate.
The practice itself is simple: describe what you are doing, out loud, in plain English, while you do it. No translating first. No perfect grammar. Just small, true sentences about the thing right in front of you. "I am holding my cup. The coffee is still warm. I am putting it down on the table."
Here is why it works. Right now, an object like your coffee cup is stored in your head in your first language, and your brain has to find it and convert it every time you want to talk about it. When you narrate your life, you point at that same cup and call it a cup, in English, in the real moment, over and over. Slowly it stops being a word you translate and becomes an English object your brain already knows. Do this with enough objects, enough times, and your day gradually fills up with things your brain reaches for in English without a detour.
It works especially well because it is low stakes twice over: the vocabulary is simple, so there is nothing to translate, and nobody is listening, so the fear that usually causes the freeze is not in the room either.
I walk through this practice live, with a real demonstration, in the video that goes with this post: How to Stop Translating in Your Head and Think in English.
Two minutes a day, while you make coffee, walk to the bus, or wash dishes, is enough to start. Most women notice the pause shrinking within a couple of weeks of doing this consistently, with a bigger shift around the six to eight week mark, in line with the general timeline for closing the understand-versus-speak gap.
If your pause comes more from feeling watched and judged than from the translation step itself, that is a related but different problem, and I wrote about the specific fix for that one separately: why do I freeze when I have to speak English. If this specifically costs you in work meetings, where the pause has an audience and a clock, see how to speak up in work meetings when English is not your first language.
Mistakes are the fastest teachers. Narrate your life out loud today, get it wrong, and keep going anyway.
Yes. Almost everyone who learned English mostly through a classroom, rather than immersion, builds this habit early on. It is common, and it is fixable.
It does not reliably go away on its own. Many advanced speakers still translate in their heads for years, because nothing in normal studying specifically targets this habit. It needs direct practice, not just more time studying.
You can start completely alone. Life narration works with no partner, since you are just describing your own surroundings out loud. A partner or community becomes useful once you want to move from narrating objects to having real back-and-forth conversation.
It usually does the opposite. More words mean more material to search through mid-translation. The fix is skipping the translation step entirely, not getting faster at it.
If you want a place to practice out loud without anyone judging the mistakes, the community is free and open today.