This paper details a piece of research based on ‘thinking aloud’ elicitation techniques. It reports on an experimental study, in which different types of interlanguage knowledge and the procedure by which it is activated in different tasks was investigated. A translation task was carried out by one learner while thinking aloud. The same Danish source text was first translated into English and then into German. The method of thinking aloud revealed that the learner performed the translation task by relying on different types of interlanguage knowledge, determined by the target language required.