The article explains unconscious manipulation as a translation-specific activity, with resort to the two major concepts of pattern and pattern completion as discussed in Gestalt psychology. It argues that the human tendency to perceive the incomplete as complete urges translators to fill in gaps in the source text by adding new parts to it or assuming new relationships between parts, in order to come up with a complete picture of it. This unconscious manipulation makes a translation a new creation, which relates to the source text not in terms of formal features, but rather through intertextuality.