The present paper is a response to Hans G. Hönig's article Positions, power and practice: functionalist approaches and translation quality assessment. The comments in this article mainly relate to the first issue Hönig rasises, namely the role of contrastive/comparative linguistics in functionalist translaton theory. According to the author this issue kept cropping up Hönig's paper, and she argues that unless this issue is revolved, the functionalist approach to translation theory, didactics and TQA is unlikely to find a way out of the impass in which it finds itself.