We measured brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while Finnish-Norwegian bilinguals silently translated sentences from Finnish into Norwegian and decided whether a later presented probe sentence was a correct translation of the original sentence. The control task included silent sentence reading and probe sentence decision within a single language, Finnish. The translation minus control task contrast activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 47) and the left basal ganglia. The left inferior frontal activation appears to be related to active semantic retrieval and the basal ganglia activation to a general action control function that works by suppressing competing responses.