Because the room isn't actually grading your answer. It's reading whether the answer looks like it came easily to you. That's not fairness, and it's not really about English. It's a documented pattern in how people evaluate each other, and it happens to land hardest on exactly the moment a bilingual executive is translating live under pressure.
In 2016, Lauren Rivera at Northwestern and András Tilcsik at Toronto published a resume audit in the American Sociological Review. They sent nearly identical fake applications to law firms across the United States. Same school, same grades, same qualifications. The only difference was a small detail buried in the interests section, a hobby that signaled a certain kind of background.
Applications with that one small signal got a callback rate more than four times higher than the others. Nothing about ability changed. Only the appearance of ease did.
A pause while reconstructing a thought in English is not read by the room as translation. It's read as strain, and strain reads as a lack of ease, exactly the signal that study penalized. You can have the better argument, full command of the content, and still lose the room, not because you were wrong, but because the room caught you visibly working.
This is the same mechanism behind why speed reads as fear, not confidence, and why a short, structured answer reads as more senior than a long one. Visible effort costs you the exact authority you're trying to demonstrate.
Not less effort. Effort that doesn't show. That's a mechanical, trainable difference, not a personality trait. It's the pause that reads as deliberate instead of searching, the sentence built from words that already come easily instead of ones you're reaching for, the delivery that sounds like this is simply how you talk, not like you're translating in real time in front of the room.
This is what Command Cadence and the rest of the Translation Tax work is actually built to train. Not more effort. The disappearance of visible effort. Take the two-minute self-assessment to see if this is your specific pattern.