This paper reports a semantic priming experiment with advanced translation students (L1 German – L2 French) who performed a lexical-decision task in intra- and inter-lingual conditions (stimulus-onset asynchrony 850 ms). Contrary to former experiments with late bilinguals, we find that the facilitated processing of semantically related words did not depend on language direction, as German and French primes produced similar facilitation effects. We interpret these results as evidence for a conceptually mediated processing of L2 words, as it is thought to develop in highly proficient bilinguals. Moreover, we find that German words were responded fastest to when preceded by a semantically related French word, although lowest reaction times are usually found when both prime and target belong to the L1. We assume that this result could be related to students' developing cognitive expertise in translating and conclude that examining the cognitive basis of translation competence can establish a link between psycholinguistics and the study of cognitive expertise in interdisciplinary research.