Since the mid 1980's, a paradigm change has taken place in Translation Studies: the primacy of the text to be translated gradually loses terrain to the reception conditions of the translated text. Such a change brought consequences to the concept of translation competence itself: translation students have to be able not only to show a good command of the languages involved, but also to activate other kinds of knowledge, in order to comprehend the text in the source language, and to design translation strategies which enable them to comply with the requirements of the translation task. The article argues that the systematic application of concepts taken from contrastive linguistics research (German/Portuguese), as well as from text linguistics, can help students to improve their knowledge of the foreign language and guide them in their first steps as translators. The theoretical considerations (Part I) are illustrated by an example taken from a translation course (Part II).
Types of knowledge and text production; acquisition of German as a foreign language; translation competence
