A thorough understanding of how translators (as goal-directed readers) understand written texts and how they reconstruct the meaning of the text in the Target Language is a prerequisite for translation theory and practice.
The traditional conception of translation, which emphasizes knowledge assimilation, does not seem to have developed translation studies to an extent, which could be a reliable theory. Therefore, we believe that particular insights from text-comprehension theories are likely to be influential in building a reliable theory of translation. For instance, constructivist theories conceive of translation or any act of learning as a process of reconstruction of meaning of a Source Text through a number of conceptual processes: inference making, problem solving, decision-making and many other metacognitive processes.Therefore, in this sense, translation is not only a matter of extracting meaning from a text, but also of constructing knowledge (about the text).