In this article Wolfram Wills considers translation behaviour from a psychological angle, and in particular whether there are any particular cognitive skills, specific to a translator. The author regards translation as an intelligent activity, but admits that not all translation situations require the same amount of intelligence, and not all translation problems are solved in essentially the same way. There remains the notion of task-specificity. Literary texts, which are predominantly based on hermeneutic reflections, are to be handled differently from technical texts, for which a predominantly analytical approach is imperative. Depending on the kind of information processing device which translators have, and the analysis of the intellectual abilities which they embrace, there will emerge a relatively realistic picture of what translation information processing is like and which type of intelligence secures adequate translator performance.