ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the reasons why translation must be treats on a level other than the linguistic one. It reviews the linguistic theories of the last century to characterise translation studies as opposed to structural and generative linguistics and showing its originality with respect to more recent tendencies. The translation theorists today place translation in the field of communication. The approach is perfectly justified as it is made clear that human communication is not the type of interaction studied in communication theory. The interactions approach puts oral exchanges at the heart of its research and attempts to reintegrate the addressee into its field of study. Langue is the sum of verbal elements governed by rules of association as well as morphological and syntactic changes and used by a community. The application of a language, parole lends itself to parole lends and trans-phrasal analysis. It studies in the French Analyse du discours, the American Discourse Analysis and the German Textlinguistik.
