As Toury (1980, 1984) points out, attempts to clarify how Translation Competence can be achieved tend to emphasize the qualities a translator needs, with relatively little regard to what a potential translator sets out with or to the gradual development they may go through, for instance in a program of translator education and training. Thus, according to Shreve (2002: 154) the term "translation competence" "has come to represent a motley set of academic understandings about what one has to know (and by implication what one has to learn or be taught) to become a translator." In his entertaining, if somewhat acerbic article, Pym (2003) divides this motley set into four main types, as follows (I present only a selection of the numerous examples Pym cites), before producing a definition of his own:

1. Summation of linguistic competencies

According to Wilss (1982: 118; see Pym 2003: 483), Translation Competence amounts to source-language text-analytical ability together with target-language text-reproductive ability. According to Koller (1979: 40; see Pym 2003: 483), it consists in "the ability to put together [verbinden] the linguistic competencies gained in two languages".

2. No such thing as "competence"

Pym (2003: 484) cites several studies by Wilss in which Translation Competence is reduced to other notions such as declarative knowledge and knowledge of translation processes (Wilss 1988), or proficiency (Wilss 1992), or code-switching (Wilss 1996). He also mentions Lörscher's (1991) reduction of Translation Competence to problem-solving strategies, and he takes Schäffner and Adab (2000: x) to task for slipping into an "almost unthinking reduction" (Pym 2003: 485) of competence to performance in their definition of competence as "a cover term and summative concept for the overall performance ability which seems so difficult to define" (Schäffner and Adab 2000: x).

3. Multicomponentiality

Under this heading, Pym (2003:485) cites Bell's (1991) listing of components such as 

target-language knowledge, text-type knowledge, source-language knowledge, subject area ("real-world") knowledge, contrastive knowledge […] "communicative competence" (covering grammar, sociolinguistics and discourse). Virtually everything that any kind of linguistics wanted to talk about was tossed into the soup