ABSTRACT
To say that translators communicate may perhaps strike one as a fairly obvious claim to make. Yet, it is this very quest for the successful exchange of meanings that is at the heart of what we pursue as professional or trainee translators, teachers or critics of translation. Typically, one might say of translators that they are constantly exchanging something, not only by engaging in a dialogue with a source text producer and a likely target text receiver, but also by brokering a deal between the two parties to communicate across both linguistic and cultural boundaries. One way of getting to the core of what takes place and of unravelling this communicative game, is to chart the routes which the major players travel along and to see the entire exercise in terms of a set of parameters within which textual activities are carried out.
