This article uses the theoretical framework proposed by Relevance Theory (Sperber &Wilson 1986/95) and advocates a competence-oriented research of translation – CORT – (Gutt 2000a) to investigate characteristics of problem solving and decision making processes in translation. For this purpose, it builds on the notion of triangulation (Jakobsen 1999) and attempts to locate, by means of the concurrent use of different data elicitation procedures, i.e. Translog and retrospective protocols, inferential patterns related to the subjects' performance. By cross-examining the translation works of four novice translators from English into Portuguese, it deals with inferential issues related to the conscious-unconscious manipulation of conceptual and procedural encodings and discusses their role in the unfolding of translation processes. By way of conclusion, it shows that a relevance-theoretical view of translation processes may be able to account for how implicatures and explicatures are expressed in different cognitive environments and, therefore, in different target texts.