This‘shared knowledge' has two aspects: linguistic and social. What we are referring to here is the distinction between linguistic competence on the one hand and social competence on the other; the two coming together in the communicative competence of the individual member of the speech community.

(a) Linguistic knomledge (internalized knowledge of the rule systems governing the code) includes, in particular, co-textual knowledge which allows the communicator to refer back and forth through the unfolding text itself. It is this kind of knowledge that allows the writer to build information into the structure of the text by marking 'new' information and distinguishing it from information which is 'old' or 'given' and the reader to recognize the structures and derive information from the text.

(b) Social knowledge (internalized knowledge of the conventions which constrain and regulate the application of the shared 'ground-rules' for communication in operation in a speech community) includes, in particular, contextual knowledge which allows the communicator to recognize that the situation of utterance is a token realization of a situational type which acts as a guide to participation. Both of these kinds of knowledge are of enormous significance for the translator.

Without the first the translator would be unable (i) to recognize the way information is distributed in a text and (ii) to identify the information focus in it. In short, comprehension (and, hence, translation) hinges on such text-knowledge. Naturally, languages vary considerably in the way they 'mark' information. English, for example, tends to interpret the distinction between 'given' and 'new' in terms of definiteness and to mark it by introducing 'new' information with a definite article the and all subsequent occurrences with indefinite a, etc.

Without the second, the translator might well be able to process text at the level of semantic sense but would be hard pressed to assign communicative value to it, since that requires contextualization which, in its turn, presupposes extra-linguistic knowledge.It is this kind of social knowledge which, for example, allows the reader to classify a text as belonging to a particular genre. It seems, then, that comprehension (and, hence, translation) hinges not only on text-knowledge but on discourse-knowledge as well.

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