The article highlights the principal difference between the traditional text-oriented approach to translation and the functionalist approach. According to the functionalist approach, an act of translation must be viewed as a means to enable ST author, TT recipient and the initiator of the translation to perform their activities. Each of them can be an assessor of translation in various communicative situations, while the distribution of assessors among communicative situations shows that a TT recipient is the key evaluator of translation. In an assessor’s perspective, a translation is adequate if it fits the given communicative situation, corresponds to the translation goal and can be used successfully by the TT recipient and/or translation initiator.