ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5 I showed that textual competence in second language trans lators varied systematically. That chapter was confined largely to examin ing the deployment of grammatical devices, and said very little about lexis. In this chapter I will discuss textual competence in second language translators from the point of view of word choice, or lexical transfers. Again, the chapter is built around a case study which employs the same data used in Chapter 5; but this time I submit it to a quite different kind of analysis, which breaks some new theoretical and methodological ground. My examination of lexis will take us a little beyond the matter of the translator’s deployment of the target language; it will start to probe the psychological motivations behind those choices. I hinted at this area of investigation in Chapter 5 when I mentioned disposition.
