Our analysis of resistance is of practical consequence for understanding localization and translation tasks. It calls for a revision of conventional notions of difficulty. For example, in the training of translators we still find texts (and whole courses) described as easy or hard on the basis of fairly dubious claims like the following:

- Subject matter: "General" texts are held to be easier to translate than“specialized" texts.

- Social location: Communication between a non-specialist sender and a general public is believed to be easier than communication between specialists.

- Register: "Everyday" language is supposed to be easier to render than "technical" or "literary" language.

- Distance: "Cultural and temporal proximity" apparently presents fewer problems than does extreme cultural and temporal distance.

Failure to consider embeddedness can lead to dubious ideas in all four areas, with consequences for pedagogical progression within training programs. From our perspective, the degrees of difficulty are likely to be quite the reverse. We would disagree, for example, with Jean Delisle's opinion that "initial training in the use of language is made unnecessarily complicated by specialized terminology" (1984:25). Delisle assumes that "general texts" are automatically free of lexical problems, as if magazine articles, publicity material, and public speeches were not the genres most susceptible to embeddedness, textually bringing together numerous socially contiguous and overlapping contexts in their creation of complex belonging. A specialized text may well present terminological problems (the translator might have to use dictionaries or talk with specialists before confidently transcoding the English "tomography" as French "tomographie" or Spanish "tomografía"). However, this is far less difficult than going through the context analysis by which Delisle himself takes seven pages or so to explain why, in a newspaper report on breast removal, the expression "sense of loss" (superbly embedded and indeterminate in English) cannot be rendered (for whom?, why?) as "sentiment de perte" (1984: 105–112).  No truly technical terms are as complex as this most vaguely "general" of examples. 

The fourth of the above criteria attempts to articulate difficulty according to distance. This is perhaps not as evident as the rest. At first glance, any kind of rewriting must be easier from a familiar context than from a distanced locale. As we have argued above (with respect to "What is the time?"), there are theoretical reasons why increases in distance tend to break the performative capacity of texts and restrict transferability. On the other hand, translation theorists like George Steiner (1975) and Seleskovitch and Lederer (1989) argue that certain modes of difficulty are inversely proportional to the distance crossed in distribution. This is because, in principle, there is less contamination from embeddedness, and less risk of following form rather than function.