“Who are they?”

Empirical data such as translators’ verbal reports, keylogs, and notes allow us to understand more clearly how translators arrive at the choices they make. In this paper, the decision-making processes of five literary translators who translated a short story by Hemingway into German will be examined, with a focus on their individual acts of meaning construction. In particular, the five translators’ decisions when faced with ambiguity and underspecification, typical features of most literary writing, will be looked at from a reader-response perspective and against the background of cognitive stylistics. As will be shown, the translators responded quite differently to the stylistic features, depending on their own stylistic awareness and preferences, their knowledge, and their habitus as translators developed over time.