Argues that the subjective evaluation of the product must give way to a descriptive and objective attempt to reveal the workings of the process (ie translating). Without such a shift, translation theory will continue outside the mainstream of intellectual activity in human sciences and fail to take its rightful place as a major field in applied Linguistics.

The author attempts to arrange the translation process and set it within a systemic model of language. The book is divided into three parts, namely model, meaning and memory, assessing how logical relationships are organized and mapped onto the syntactic systems of a language. Bell firstly defines translation for the purposes of his book and argues that a major specification for the successful organization of translation into a manageable system is translator competence. Other books in this series include An Introduction to Second Language Acquisition Research, The Classroom and the Language Learner and Bilingualism in Education.