The present paper is a response to Hang G. Hönig's paper Positions, power and practice: functionalist approaches and translation quality assessment. The author argues that het most striking way to distinguish between a group of translations is not according to how literal or free each of them happens to be. According to the author the following factors tend to give a translation its particular flavour: the amount of knowledge are assumed to possess; how inventive the translator is (or conversely, to what extent he or she relies on equivalents suggested by a dictionary); how well the translation reads; to what extent items are transplanted into the target culture; how much extra information is added, and the nature of such interpolation.