ABSTRACT
Ian Mason describes an interesting case of dialogue interpreting: at an immigration interview, a Polish speaker utters words which grammatically mean 'I have the passport at my place', but it appears from context that she means that the passport is at 'his place'. Starting from Mason Disick's idea of a dialogue interpreter making various moves, such as repairing miscommunication, the chapter looks at the production of written translations in terms of switching among various ways of producing language. Translators may report all and only what they see as the meaning of the source text, or they may report what they think the source writer should have written or might have written. Hence a reworking of the traditional distinction between translating and adapting is proposed, and a passage from the historian Thucydides is analyzed to shed light on the distinction between what someone wrote and what they might have written.
