as Pym puts it. Also included are Hatim and Mason's (1997: 204–206) source-text processing, transfer, and target-text processing, with several skills under each heading, and Hewson's (1995: 108) additional "cultural and professional elements", including, under professional elements, "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". Hurtado (1996, 1999) also appears here, as does Mayoral (2001: 109), who includes (see Pym 2003: 486) "common sense (above all), curiosity, ability to communicate, capacity for self-criticism, meticulousness, ability to synthesize, etc.", and Robinson (1997) who adds "good typing speeds, Internet discussion groups, and working with a computer in a room at the right temperature".

4. Just one thing

Under this heading Pym (2003: 487) lists Toury's (1984, 1986) "transfer competence", which requires particular modes of socialization (cf. Toury 1995: 246, 250; to be discussed below), and Koller's (1992: 20; Pym 2003: 488) "creativity involved in finding and selecting between equivalents, and in the increasingly necessary [skills of] text production".

5. Pym's own minimalist definition

Pym's own view is that Translation Competence consists of two skills (2003:489), "The ability to generate a series of more than one viable target text (TTI, TT2 ... TTn) for a pertinent source text (ST)" and "The ability to select only one viable TT from this series, quickly and with justified confidence." He defends this position by pointing out (2003: 492–494) that (i) it allows for a clear distinction between translator training and language learning; (ii) it "sees translating as a process of producing and selecting between hypotheses" and that it is therefore "a mode of constant theorizing"; (iii) it "challenges the authoritarian role …[of] the teacher of translation"; and, finally and importantly, (iv) it "can sustain a critical approach to those tasks and technologies that […] mistake means for ends":

For instance, the postmodern abundance of information makes the production of alternative TTs easy, which means that more emphasis has to be placed on the elimination of possible TTs […]. On the other hand, the use of translation memories facilitates the unthinking repetition of previous TTs, such that what is lacking in such modes of work is the active production of hypotheses […]. More important, the use of websites, memories and the rest […] invite[s] us to forget that our basic tasks involve communication between humans, and only then the manipulation of electronic mediation.

True and important though this may be, Pym's model is still of the desirable end state of Translation Competence; it has little to say about the aspiring translator's starting point and journey, issues to which I now turn.

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