This paper uses translation studies and the practice of translation to investigate a hypothesis, which will have to be put to the cognitive sciences’ test. The hypothesis is that, quite often, translation is not a one-off procedure, but a three-pronged process, involving intralingual, interlingual and, again, intralingual translation (following Jakobson, 1963/1992). The aim is to make the cognitive load more manageable when actually ferrying the text from one language into another. This process we call sloth, or laziness, and give a positive sense to that word. We thus start from actual examples, before considering the question in translation studies terms, and then moving on to cognitive science aspects, using mainly Kahneman (2011).