ADVANCES IN AREAS SUCH AS TEXTUAL LINGUISTICS, discourse analysis, systemic grammar and cognitive psychology have contributed to the development of a descriptive theory of translation, in contrast to the traditional prescriptive approach. In a descriptive approach to translation, one major concern is to identify the kinds of knowledge that are used by the translator (Bell, 1991). As Bell observes, the translator' s communicative competence is made up of various kinds of linguistic and social knowledge in both the source and the target language. In the present paper, I will analyze one aspect of the linguistic knowledge that translators must possess — knowledge about textual cohesion.
