The present contribution is based on a paper the author presented at a French conference entitled "Translation - from practice to theory and from theory to practice" held at the University of South Brittany in Lorient in the summer of 2003. It discusses the interpretative theory of translation, which main contribution to Translation Studies is the concept of deverbalisation. The present article looks at the link between interpretative theory and cognitive linguistics, interpretative theory and Scenes-and-frames semantics. The author concludes with an illustration of the balance between topic-down and bottom-up processing.