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What's the meaning of sub-competence? I've searched everywhere but I couldn't find a thing

This term is primarily specific to Communicative Competence and depends on context, broadly it is a "sub" division of linguistic skills (i.e. not necessarily literary).

In 1980, the applied linguists Canale and Swain published an influential article in which they argued that the ability to communicate required four different sub-competencies:

•grammatical (ability to create grammatically correct utterances),

•sociolinguistic (ability to produce sociolinguistically appropriate utterances),

•discourse (ability to produce coherent and cohesive utterances),

and

•strategic (ability to solve communication problems as they arise).

In translation the PACTE model mentions five sub-competences:

Bilingual sub-competence, which comprises the ability to communicate in two
languages;

Extra-linguistic competence: world knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, bicultural knowledge

Knowledge about translation, both how translation functions and professional translation practice.

Instrumental sub-competence, using resources e.g.
dictionaries, encyclopaedias & search engines

Strategic sub-competence, which controls the translation process.

EMT has also developed a model, a translator competence profile. According to this model,

there are six competences:

- The translation service provision competence

- The language competence

- The intercultural competence

- The information mining competence

- The thematic competence

- The technological competence (mastery of tools)

Usually you would see incompetent, which is a combination of "competere" (think compete, and fitness or match) and "in-" the standard issue negating prefix (e.g., invalid, incomplete, imprecise [the bilabial phoneme comes into play here because of the p]).

I'm no linguist, so I cannot say whether sub-competent has literary precedent. However, from it's composition, I would define it as such:

sub-competent (adj): below or beneath the necessary level of competence.

Which is basically incompetent. The only difference I would suppose would be that incompetent refers to a generally absolute level of inability; i.e., you cannot do it at all; whereas sub-competent would imply that you can do it to some degree, and it may be a skillful level, even, but it is not sufficient to complete the task at hand. I would note that this semantic line is so gray that it may not at this time be linguistically productive to use this term.