Relationship-driven learners are typically strong in personal intelligence; they learn best when they like and trust the presenter. WHO delivers the information is more important than WHAT the information is. Relationship-driven learners will learn poorly from teachers they dislike or mistrust. Relationship-driven language-learners tend also to be field-dependent, and learn foreign languages best in the countries where they are natively spoken; and there prefer to learn from a close friend or group of friends, or from a spouse or family.
Relationship-driven translators often become interpreters, so that cross-cultural communication is always in a context of interpersonal relationship as well. When they work with written texts, they like to know the source-language writer and even the target-language end-user personally.
Content-driven learners are typically stronger in linguistic and logical/mathematic than in personal intelligence; they focus most fruitfully on the information content of a written or spoken text. Learning is dependent on the effective presentation of information, not on the learner's feelings about the presenter. Content-driven language-learners prefer to learn a foreign language as a logical syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic system; c ontent-driven student translators prefer to learn about translation through rules, precepts, and systems diagrams. Content-driven translators focus their attention on specialized terms and terminologies and the object worlds they represent; syntactic structures and cross-linguistic transfer patterns; stylistic registers and their equivalencies across linguistic barriers.
