What is translation competence?

Kirsten Malmkjær

Dans Revue française de linguistique appliquée 2009/1 (Vol. XIV), pages 121 à 134

1Recently, there has been considerable interest within translation studies in the metalanguage of the discipline (see e.g.
the special issue of Target [Gambier & Van Doorslær 2007]) devoted to it. This focus arises against the background of
the multiple disciplines that have played greater or lesser parts in the development of Translation Studies over the past
thirty years or so. In the course of this development, much terminology has come to be shared across the disciplines,
while the continuing, independent or semi-independent development of the various disciplines has meant that many of
the concepts underlying the shared terminology have developed in different directions; and the shared terminology
often masks discipline specific notions.
2In this article, it is my intention to explore the concept of translation competence by measuring it against a notion
which some scholars explicitly relate it to, namely linguistic competence, in order to see if it is possible to achieve a
measure of clarity about the former notion by trying to match it as closely as possible to the latter. I want to do this
because the notion of translation competence is central in translation theory as well as in pedagogical approaches to
translation; yet the vast literature on the subject has arguably created more confusion than clarity (see Pym 2003). I will
begin by describing the notion of linguistic competence as currently understood.

1 – The concept of competence

1.1 – Linguistic competence

Within theoretical linguistics, the notion of competence is the notion of a native speaker’s knowledge of their language,
which is sharply distinguished from their performance, “the actual use of language in concrete situations” (Chomsky
1965, 4). Speakers’ abilities to do things with words in actuality depend heavily on aspects of context (see Austin 1962;
Hymes 1971, 1972a, 1972b) which lie way beyond the area that can be theorized from the Chomskyan perspective on
language as primarily part of the natural world, rather than the social world, and of competence as an unconscious
mental state reached at the end of a process of biological growth.
This process of biological growth consists in interaction between (i) linguistic input data received by the language-
acquiring individual and (ii) the default or initial state of the language faculty, which contains innate knowledge called
Universal Grammar (UG) (Wearing 2006, 341). UG includes (i) “a set of innately endowed grammatical principles which
determine how grammatical operations apply in natural language grammars”; and (ii) “a set of grammatical parameters
which impose severe restrictions on the range of grammatical variation permitted in natural languages (perhaps limiting
variation to binary choices)” (Radford 2004, 17). In addition, there is “a set of semantic primitives, out of which specific
word meanings are constructed” (Carr 2006, 333).
At the end of this process of interaction, we reach the steady state that is competence, which is characteristic of every
normal adult native speaker of a given language. Variations in performance are exactly that: performance features,
influenced by aspects of the social world, including other individuals, education, geographical location, social position,
and so on. Competence is internal to each single individual; it is an I-language. It is not the shared, social, supra-
individual entity that Saussure’s (1916) langue is often understood to be (Lyons 1996, 15), and which, for Chomsky, who
of course does not deny its existence, is E-language. I-language is not primarily designed for use in communication,
according to Chomsky (though of course he would not deny that it is used in communication), but for thinking (Carr
2006, 332).
In linguistics, there is tacit agreement that this is what the term competence means within the discipline, whether or not
a person agrees with the theory that the notion belongs within. And because everyone more or less agrees with the
definition, people in linguistics mostly know what they are talking about when they use the term, and that is very useful.
But it is not the way that the term competence is used in most other areas that use it as a technical term.

1.2 – Broader concepts of competence

According to Wikipedia, in human resources parlance, competence is viewed as
a standardized requirement for an individual to properly perform a specific job. It encompasses a combination of
knowledge, skills and behavior utilized to improve performance. More generally, competence is the state or quality of
being adequately or well qualified, having the ability to perform a specific role.
According to the project “Promoting Social Competence” run by the University of Dundee in collaboration with the
Scottish Executive, “Social Competence is possessing and using the ability to integrate thinking, feeling and behaviour to
achieve social tasks and outcomes valued in the host context and culture.” [1][1]See <http:// www. dundee. ac. uk/
fedsoc/ research/ projects/…

What distinguishes these definitions from the notion of Linguistic Competence can be depicted as in Table 1:
Table 1

Competence in linguistics and in other contexts.

Broader concepts of Competence Linguistic Competence

is variable between individuals is identical in each individual

can be improved by teaching is acquired, not learnt

includes aspects of performance is opposed to performance

includes skills is knowledge

In the following section, I will discuss some of the notions of translation competence that we find within translation
studies, and attempt to determine whether they lean toward one, both, or neither of the two views of competence
depicted in Table 1.

1.3 – Translation competence

Even those discussions of translation competence in translation studies that strive towards the Chomskyan
understanding tend to include aspects of, or be akin to, the Human resources and Social Competence definitions. For
example, PACTE (2000, 100) claim to have borrowed the notion of translation competence “from the idea of linguistic
competence”, but they define translation competence as including an array of knowledges, skills and abilities which vary
between individuals and which would never find their way into the notion of linguistic competence.
According to PACTE [2][2]PACTE research group (Proceso de Adquisición de la Competencia…, there are six
subcomponents of translation competence, which I list briefly here with just a smattering of what PACTE includes under
each (PACTE, 2000, 101-102):

1. Communicative Competence in two languages, including linguistic, discourse and

sociolinguistic competence.
2. Extra-Linguistic Competence composed of general world knowledge and specialist
knowledge.
3. Instrumental-Professional Competence composed of knowledge and skills related
to the tools of the trade and the profession.
4. Psycho-Physiological Competence, “defined as the ability to use all kinds of
psychomotor, cognitive and attitudinal resources” including “psychomotor skills
for reading and writing; cognitive skills (e.g. memory, attention span, creativity
and logical reasoning); psychological attitudes (e.g. intellectual curiosity,
perseverance, rigour, a critical spirit, and self-confidence)”.
5. Transfer Competence, which is “the ability to complete the transfer process from
the ST (source text) to the TT (target text), i.e. to understand the ST and re-
express it in the TL (target language), taking into account the translation’s function
and the characteristics of the receptor”.
 6. Strategic Competence, which includes “all the individual procedures, conscious
and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal, used to solve the problems found during
the translation process”.
Such a list raises two questions: is it useful to include so many features as part of translation competence? and why do
so many scholars of translation competence proceed in this fashion, so that, in Shreve’s words (2002, 154) the term
“translation competence” “has come to represent a motley set of academic understandings about what one has to know
(and by implication what one has to learn or be taught) to become a translator”. Pym (2003, 15 on the web version)
provides an entertaining account of a number of these:

Bell (1991) describes translator competence as a huge summation: target-language knowledge, text-type knowledge,
source-language knowledge, subject area (‘real-world’) knowledge, contrastive knowledge, then decoding and encoding
skills summarized as ‘communicative competence’ (covering grammar, sociolinguistics and discourse). Virtually
everything that any kind of linguistics wanted to talk about was tossed into the soup. […] Hatim and Mason (1997, 204-
206), working from Bachman (1990), present a traditional three-part competence inherited from linguistics (ST
processing, transfer, TT processing) and then name a handful of skills for each of those heads. Hewson (1995) adds
something called ‘cultural and professional elements’ (108), where the ‘professional’ part refers to ‘remuneration […]
access to and use of proper dictionaries and data banks, access to equivalent material in the second language, practical
knowledge of word-processors and peripherals, and so on’ (ibid.). […] Mayoral (2001, 109) insists on components
including ‘common sense (above all), curiosity, ability to communicate, capacity for self-criticism, meticulousness, ability
to synthesize, etc.’ Anything else? In Douglas Robinson’s Becoming a Translator (1997) we find serious attention to the
real-world necessities of good typing speeds, Internet discussion groups, and working with a computer in a room at the
right temperature [sic].
Pym explains this proliferation of features in accounts of translation competence with reference to a perceived need to
establish the discipline as something separate from linguistics and from language learning; another reason that people
include so many features is probably that the task of the translator is indeed very complex. But are all of these desirable
states and characteristics really parts of translation competence, or are some better placed in lists of more general
competences, leaving translation competence to specify just those features that are peculiar to the translation task?
De Groot (2000, 54) provides an interesting discussion of how to identify task specific components of complex tasks. Her
discussion is framed in training-oriented terms, but I think it works equally well as a guide to concept inclusion in an
account of task-specific skills:
Not all components that can be distinguished in a criterion task will need to be trained because a number of them may
be mastered already at the onset of training. An example is visual word recognition, in translating written text. In fluent
readers this process proceeds to a large extent automatically and effortlessly […] on the assumption that the typical
trainee selected for participation in a translation training program will be a fluent reader, the inclusion of a visual-word-
recognition component in such a program would thus be a waste of time and effort.
It is my belief that all of the components listed by the scholars included in Pym’s entertaining article (2003), with the
exception of the notion of transfer competence, may be prerequisites to translation, or desirable states which may
enhance translation, which, however, do not make a translator. Let me now spend some time unpacking this notion of
transfer competence.

1.4 – Transfer competence

According to Toury (1984), transfer competence requires particular modes of socialisation (cf. Toury 1995, 246, 250). So
however closely it may turn out to be possible to align the notion of transfer competence with a Chomsky-style account,
it is unlikely that we shall achieve the Chomskyan elevation above the social. But if we can align other aspects of transfer
competence to linguistic competence, the prospect of transfer competence as a category that encompasses aspects
similar to those that characterise linguistic competence along with aspects similar to performance features presents
itself invitingly. Perhaps the phenomenon of translation illustrates more clearly than any other the connections between
competence and performance.
Let us begin by imagining transfer competence as that which every adult translator has. Let us say that this competence
has developed against the background of interaction between an initial state and relevant input.
What, then, might the initial state be like? Presumably, it would need to include two or more languages in whatever
measure, depending on when acquisition/learning of the various languages began. The input data would probably need
to be translational: seeing translation, doing translation, and receiving feedback on translation, because there is plenty
of evidence that just having two or more languages is not sufficient for someone to develop translation competence (see
e.g. Toury 1984; Valdés 2003). So maybe we, researchers, could describe transfer competence as :

 the knowledge of the translational relationships between their languages that allows
a translator to match languages appropriately when translating, as distinct from their
ability to use their languages individually;
 an unconscious mental state reached through a process of cognitive development.
Before I go on to refine this definition, I will take a closer look at the initial state.

2 – Bilingualism

2.1 – The nature of the initial state: (developing) linguistic competence in two languages
In the Chomskyan tradition I have modeled my theory of transfer competence on, relatively little has been said about
bilingualism and bilingual acquisition; but there is a clear tendency not to distinguish these from monolingualism and
monolingual acquisition in any fundamental way (Chomsky 2000, 169):
Even to speak of Peter as having the I-language L is a severe simplification; the state of any person’s faculty of language
is some jumble of systems that is no more likely to yield theoretical understanding than most other complex phenomena
of the natural world. Peter is said to be multilingual when the differences among his languages happen to interest us for
one or another reason; from another point of view, everyone is multiply multilingual.
This is not especially helpful from our point of view, because translational behaviour, properly speaking, can only
proceed on the assumption that the bilingual is conscious of their languages as separate languages, however they
happen to be organized in the mind. This may be something that translation studies can helpfully dwell on and feed into
linguistics.
The quotation from Chomsky strongly suggests that a major task for the developing translator is (i) to keep the
languages apart in the first place to avoid malignant interference from one to the other and (ii) simultaneously to
consider them together in order to be able (iii) to match a given stretch of one language with a contextually appropriate
stretch of the other language. If this is right, then a more informative description of transfer competence than the one I
have just provided might be this, where the notion of non-consciousness is beginning to disappear:

 a translator’s knowledge of their languages simultaneously as one system, and as at

least separable, and as related (as distinct from their ability to use their languages
individually);
 an “unconscious” mental state reached through a process of cognitive development.
This view is compatible with one of the current understandings of Bilingual Language Acquisition, according to which
children who are addressed in two languages from birth “have two first languages: A and Alpha” (De Houwer 2006, 780).
The evidence for this is that “from the onset of even somewhat intelligible speech, children raised with two languages
from birth mostly produce utterances that can be related to just one of either of their input languages”. They do not mix
the two systems randomly, but are able to switch easily and contextually appropriately “between unilingual utterances
in language A, unilingual utterances in language Alpha, and mixed utterances” (De Houwer 2006, 784). Therefore, they
must from early on be “able to determine that the huge range of variation in speech sounds that they are exposed to
can be categorized according to two main categories, two main ways of speaking” (De Houwer 2006, 781).
This view may seem to be in conflict with the Chomskyan position, but the two views can be reconciled with reference
to insights from the neurolinguistics of bilingualism (Paradis 1985, 1987a, 2004; see also Ahlsén 2006 and Fabbro 1999).

2.2 – The neurolinguistics of bilingualism

Like Chomsky, Paradis assumes no categorical difference between bilingualism and monolingualism. A bilingual has “two
subsets of neural connections, one for each language, within the same cognitive system, namely, the language system”
(Paradis 2004, 110), but (Paradis 2004, 112):

awareness of language membership is a product of metalinguistic knowledge. In online processing, language awareness
is of the same nature and as unconscious as the process that allows a unilingual speaker to understand (or select) the
appropriate word in a given context. The process of selecting a Russian word by a Latvian-Russian bilingual person is the
same as the process that allows a unilingual Russian speaker to select among the indefinite, almost unlimited,
possibilities for encoding a given message.
Both processes involve relating the selected item to a single, language-independent conceptual component (Paradis
2004, 200):

the conceptual component of verbal communication is not language-specific and there is a single non-linguistic cognitive
system, even though speakers group together conceptual features differently in accordance with the lexical semantic
constraints of each language. The lexical items are part of the language system, but the concepts are not.
According to Paradis’s Activation Threshold Hypothesis (1987b, 1993, 2004, 28-31), a linguistic item stored in a
bilingual’s brain requires, at any one time, a certain amount of positive neural impulse to activate it, and this
requirement is its activation threshold. Every time an item is activated, the threshold is lowered, but it rises again if the
item is not activated for a while. Whenever one item is activated, all other possible alternative items are inhibited, that
is, their activation thresholds are raised. For whole languages, the process is described as follows (Paradis 2004, 115):
When one language is selected for expression, the activation threshold of the other language is raised so as to avoid
interference […]. However, it is not raised so high that it could not be activated by an incoming verbal stimulus that
impinges on the auditory sensory system and sends impulses to the corresponding representation […] the unselected
language is not totally inhibited. Its activation threshold is simply raised high enough to prevent self-activation, but not
so high as to preclude comprehension.
I think this accords well with the description of transfer competence I presented above.
So how might transfer competence develop? And how unconscious is it?

2.3 – Natural translation

The development of linguistic competence is commonly described in terms of a set of stages that the language acquiring
infant and child goes through from the onset of the development in early childhood until its completion by very early
adulthood. A similar account was given of the development of translation competence by Harris and Sherwood (1978)
who explicitly model themselves on Chomsky (Harris & Sherwood 1978, 160) and who consider translation to be an
innate skill, as their title suggests.
Harris (1977, 96 [3][3]Quoted from eric on: <hhttp:// eric. ed. gov/ ERICWebPortal/…) suggests that the best way of
investigating this skill is to study “the translation done by bilinguals in everyday circumstances and without special
training for it”, in the same way that linguists at the time tried (and many still try) to lay bare UG by way of the study of
naturally occurring spoken discourse, as opposed to written text. He says:

The scientific study of translation, translatology, is behind linguistics in the study of data. While linguistics has reached
out to include all speech acts within its proper study, the data of translatology remain, almost exclusively, professionally
authored texts. The proper study of translatology is all translation. Everyday speech should not merely be included; it
should be given priority. Translatologists should first study natural translation, which may be defined as the translation
done by bilinguals in everyday circumstances and without special training for it. Several studies have been done on
bilingualism which have produced relevant data; more research must be done, however, with natural translation as the
specific object of the study.
There is an assumption here that speaking spontaneously relates to writing in the same way that interpreting relates to
translation, and I am not sure that this is the case; I think the TT-ST relationship in each case makes quite a crucial
difference; but let that lie for now. Harris also claims that all bilinguals are able to translate, a controversial claim indeed,
though clearly its validity depends radically on what is meant by “translate”. No doubt all bilinguals can match up bits of
their language, but research in Think Aloud Protocol Studies, and earlier, by Toury (1984, 89) suggests that the
production of socially acceptable translations is learnt, not innate behaviour, as we can see from the fact that not all
translators achieve it and also from the fact that what is socially acceptable translation changes over time. The
behaviour is norm governed.
There is also good evidence that even Natural Translation is not, actually, automatically coextensive with bilingualism.
Valdés (2003) suggests that equally strong bilinguals (insofar as it is possible to measure this) interpret unequally well,
and both teaching and practice of the activity can help them. As she puts it (2003, 173), “the unfolding of innate
capacities is a function of bilingual speakers’ actual practice in translating or interpreting”.
Valdés’ study (2003) includes an account of 25 children ranging in ages from 4 to 12 years who interpret for their
families. The children’s abilities varied: adults would begin by selecting the oldest child in the family to interpret,
because they would be taken more seriously, but (2003, 78)
Over the years, however, the families turn to other children in the family. This is especially the case when a younger
child is identified as more able and more enthusiastic about interpreting […] In general, parents nominated children they
considered to be good in both languages. Parents also selected the child who seemed to like translating.
The purpose of the 1978 paper where Harris works with Sherwood is to test the postulate that all bilinguals can translate
by showing that young bilingual children can do so because (1978, 155):
If all bilinguals, even nascent ones, can translate, and since the onset of bilingualism often occurs in infancy, we ought,
so our postulate predicts, to find young children translating. The previous articles brought forward evidence that this is
so: young children do translate. […] However […] one does not expect a natural skill to develop fully overnight. An
attempt will be made to trace the stages that the young natural translator goes through.
Harris & Sherwood identify the stages that the young translator goes through on the basis, largely, of their reading of
the famous case studies of childhood bilingualism by Ronjat (1913) and Leopold (1949). The stages are:
(i) Pretranslation observed by Ronjat in his French-German bilingual son, from the time the child was one year and two
months old. Pretranslation involves automatic production of both realizations (one in each language) of one concept, as
exemplified by the following examples from Ronjat (cit. Harris & Sherwood 1978, 166):
(1) Father: Dis merci (French: “say thank you”)
Child: Danke (German: “thank you”)
(2) Mother: Was hat Papa im Mund (German: “what has father in his mouth?”)
Child: Pfeife (German: “pipe”)
(3) Father: Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? (French: “what is it that it is?”)
Child: Pipe (French: “pipe”).
According to Ronjat, in the first case, the child responds by reflex in German because he is most often asked to say
“thank you” in that language. In the second case, the languages of inquiry simply trigger two linguistic realisations of the
one concept. Harris & Sherwood (1978, 166) call this a “bilingual response”, and in neither case, according to Ronjat as
well as to Harris & Sherwood, is translation involved. The child at this stage (co-extensive with the one-word stage of
monolingual acquisition) can also be observed spontaneously rehearsing word
pairs: œil/Auge (“eye”); Schiff/Bateau (“boat”), a playful, enjoyable use of the two languages which persists later (Harris
& Sherwood 1978, 166).
(ii) Interpersonal autotranslation means translation of one’s own utterance for the benefit of others (1978, 165). This is
concurrent with the later stages of pretranslation, and was observed by Ronjat from when his son was aged one year
and nine months. It is preceded by a stage during which the child autotranslates for itself; this stage can clearly be
considered similar in nature and motivation to the playfulness with single words just mentioned.
(iii) Transduction is defined as “communication in which the translator acts as an intermediary between two other
people” (1978, 165). This was observed by Leopold in his daughter when she was three years and three months old. It is
clearly what most people think of as translation.
Harris & Sherwood (1978, 167) speculate about the relationship between these stages and monolingual language
development and about which of the notions of innateness then prevalent in developmental psycholinguistics is relevant
to their study: A weak sense of “a specialized predisposition in children to learn how to speak from the language they
hear in their environment”; or the strong sense of “an inherited ‘theory’ of language (‘universal grammar’) which
enables the child to speak sooner and more grammatically than can be accounted for by its chronology [i.e. age]” (1978,
168). In spite of the above mentioned parallel which Harris & Sherwood (1978, 160) draw between Natural Translation
and “Chomsky’s sense of ‘competence’”, they now opt for the weak sense of innateness, because they believe that only
this will allow them to speculate about what may be required for the special disposition to engage in Natural Translation
over and above what is required for the acquisition of the languages as such. I think they are probably right to do so.
They list the following as potential features (1978, 168-169):

i. the pleasure that young children derive from translating

ii. a bilingual mental lexicon
iii. a language-independent semantic store
iv. an ability to conserve meaning across languages
Clearly, Harris & Sherwood’s findings amount to no more than rather weakly based hypotheses about the
developmental stages that a natural translator goes through, since each stage is exemplified by only one or a very few
individuals speaking different language pairs. Nevertheless, we can take Harris & Sherwood’s proposed stages as an
hypothesis to be further tested, and meanwhile we can see how well it is relatable (i) to the more carefully developed,
contemporary hypothesis of Universal Grammar (UG), (ii) to recent findings from the neurolinguistics of bilingualism,
and (iii) to recent explorations in the area of translation ability.
If the proposed stages were found to be supported, there would be certain advantages, especially with regard to the
first stage: (i) a spontaneous pretranslation stage lets us off the difficult theoretical hook of accounting for first steps; if
translation links are established between languages as they are acquired, we have a good basis for translation activity
proper. And (ii) innately endowed pretranslation would provide a rationale for cognitively determined translation
universals such as the under-representation in translations of features of the target language that are not shared by the
source language (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004). The proposed explanation for this universal is that TL unique items (vis-à-vis
SL [source language]) are under-represented in a translator’s mental lexicon while he or she is translating. Nothing in the
source text is likely to trigger them. The idea of pretranslation strengthens this supposition, because it suggests that the
lack of opportunity for linking to the other language during acquisition may result in a permanently weak activation of
unique items, compared to terms that have counterparts in the other language.
With regard to the four features that Harris & Sherwood deduce for the bilingual, translating child over and above its
natural predisposition to acquire language, two (a bilingual mental lexicon and a language-independent semantic store)
are accounted for within currently preferred theories of Linguistic Competence and the Neurolinguistics of Bilingualism.
Recall the quotation from Paradis (2004, 112):
The process of selecting a Russian word by a Latvian-Russian bilingual person is the same as the process that allows a
unilingual Russian speaker to select among the indefinite, almost unlimited, possibilities for encoding a given message.
It is also compatible with Chomsky’s (2000, 169) understanding of everyone as multiply multilingual. The existence of a
bilingual mental lexicon is not what distinguishes bilinguals from monolinguals.
As for the language-independent semantic store, again, this is posited by Paradis (2004, 200):
the conceptual component of verbal communication is not language-specific and there is a single non-linguistic cognitive
system, even though speakers group together conceptual features differently in accordance with the lexical semantic
constraints of each language. The lexical items are part of the language system, but the concepts are not.
I suppose that the ability to preserve meaning across languages is transfer competence, which we have repeatedly
unpacked as the consciousness of the language systems as together, separate and related.
The final thing we may need and want to pay attention to in addition in our account of the initial state that provides the
bases for the development of transfer competence is the translation pleasure principle, if Harris & Sherwood are right.
Perhaps we should describe the initial state like this, where the translation pleasure principle has been added to the
description we set out with:
The development of transfer competence takes place by means of interaction between:

i. translation related input data

ii. an initial state consisting of (developing) linguistic competence in two or more
languages + the translation pleasure principle
Maybe this is not as far-fetched as it may seem: recall that the notion of enthusiasm and enjoyment of translating was
introduced in the study by Valdés (2003).

Of 13 young interpreters Valdés interviewed, 2 spoke directly about their enjoyment in interpreting, and none “spoke of
their experiences in a negative way” (ibid., 90).
It is also the case that a small group of TAPs (Think-Aloud Protocols) researchers who have investigated translator
attitudes and motivation suggest that translation quality is likely to be positively affected by a translator’s personal
affinity and involvement with the translation task, while a disinterested translator is less likely to produce a high quality
translation. Laukkanen (1996, 270) goes so far as to suggest that “negative attitudes may […] have an adverse effect on
the quality of [a translator’s] work”, although this study is inconclusive about direct benefits of a positive attitude. For
her part, Jääskeläinen (1996, 69) suggests that “affective factors, be they personal involvement, commitment,
motivation, or attitude, play a significant role in translation as well as in other forms of human behaviour”, and
Tirkkonen-Condit & Laukkanen (1996, 45) suggest that “the right affective frame of mind goes with creativity and
success in translation”. Kussmaul & Tirkkonen-Condit (1995, 191) add that “Personal characteristics such as tolerance of
ambiguity, flexibility, realism and intellectual curiosity seem to contribute to success of performance”.
There is one problem left with the description of transfer competence, though, namely the use of the transfer metaphor.
As I understand meaning, meaning is generated anew in each speech encounter so that there is nothing in fact to
transfer. But this means that what I have so far called “transfer competence”, has to be called “translation competence”,
because if meaning is ever new, it makes little sense to talk of transfer (cf. Reddy 1979).
Translation competence, as it is now called, develops via interaction between

i. translation related input data

ii. an initial state consisting of (developing) linguistic competence in two or more
languages + the translation pleasure principle
and it gives rise to enhanced translation skills exhibited through a translator’s increasing ability to juggle the three forms
of their languages to produce the kinds of translation that contemporary norms request – or, of course, contravening
the norms, if that is the translator’s desire.

Notes

 [1]

See <http:// www. dundee. ac. uk/ fedsoc/ research/ projects/

socialcompetence>.

 [2]

PACTE research group (Proceso de Adquisición de la Competencia Traductora y

Evaluación) was established in October 1997 at the University of Barcelona
(Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, Departament de Tradducció i
d’Interpretació). Its main aim is to investigate Translation Competence and its
acquisition in written translation in order to improve the teaching of translation
(link: <http:// www. fti. uab. es/ pacte/ indexenglish. htm>).

 [3]

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recordDetails/ detailmini.jsp?
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ype_0=no&accno=ED142035>.