ABSTRACT
It is customary to think of the source text (ST) as a product of time and space and as a text set in a time and place, about both of which the translator has decisions to make. Wilhelm von Humboldt makes the following observation about language's relationship with time, in a passage the author has already had occasion to quote for other purposes. Capacity is both what is inventive in the bringing forth of language and what is transitory in its nature. Translations may not bring about changes in language, but they show how language can change; and inasmuch as they also establish themselves as text, they make themselves repositories, or exemplars, of change, if not instruments of it. Language, then, exists in a double time, the enduring time of its stability, of its reality as langue, and the transitory time of its being made in the moment of utterance, in the moment of its being langage.
