Background Parents said that they sometimes wished they had a multilingual physician as an interpreter, because the physician would understand the child's care and treatment and share a language with the parents. Aim To understand and describe the lived experience of multilingual neonatal healthcare professionals dealing with interpreting in their workplace, performing as interpreters in addition to their regular work. Methods Interviews with multilingual neonatal healthcare professionals and analysed using a phenomenological reflective lifeworld approach. Results Multilingual healthcare professionals understood the interpreting experience as being a gift, comprising three themes: feeling satisfaction – happiness from helping workplace colleagues; identifying with families – empathy from having been in the same situation; and expected to be available – colleagues expected them to provide interpreting services. Conclusion This study found that it is common in neonatal care to use multilingual healthcare professionals to interpret communication with parents when language barriers exist.