Vertaalcompetentie en Vertaaltheorie

This paper describes the results of a study on the influence of two rather different factors on the quality of a translation: L2 proficiency on the one hand and familiarity with translation theory on the other. Three groups of Dutch university students were asked to translate a French advertisement text on tourism into their first language: two groups (students of French studies en students of German studies) attended the translator's training programme; the third group studied only French. The model for translation quality assessment used here is based on a functional concept of translation: a translation is an independent text functioning in the target culture. The analysis revealed that students from the first two groups, who had reflected on translation processing, had better results than the third group: they made less functional errors beacause they were trained in taking the function of the translation into account and produced a Dutch text that was more adequate. L2 proficiency had only a secondary positive effect on the translation.