This doctoral thesis is an investigation into the pragmatic competence of English-Arabic trainee translators, as represented by their inferential ability to interpret implied discourse relations in an English source text. Drawing on research into second language pragmatics acquisition, as well as the Relevance-Theory approach to utterance comprehension, the study employs a think-aloud protocol to monitor the participants' translation process. Different patterns of inferential processing are identified as regards the interpretation of discourse relations, which both demonstrate the problematic nature of this aspect of pragmatic competence, as well as highlight the role of classroom instruction in the development of such pragmatic abilities. This project aims to contribute to existing research in the fields of second language pragmatics acquisition and process-oriented translation studies. The study also sets out to make an empiricallybased contribution to the area of research concerned with the application of secondlanguage- acquisition concepts to translator training.