Translators translate texts, not languages. The linguistic approaches that fail to take into account their semiotic characteristics are inadequate. It is more appropriate to maintain traductology and translation within the tradition of hermeneutics that deals with texts as cultural objects. Translation is an interpretative reworking of texts whose aim is transmission. Text semantics provides a single theoretical framework for a top-down approach to interpretation and translation. A typology of genres would benefit the practice of translation since local determinations result from generic constraints. Semantic figures and backgrounds evolve and change thus determining textual passages whose boundaries are set in the course of interpretation. It is at this local level, and irrespective of the linear order of speech or writing, that the process of translation is carried out.

Verbs of saying are traditionally analysed as semantically dependent on the extralinguistic environment in which direct speech occurs. It is however argued here that there is a two-way relation of mutual dependency between the reporting phrase and the reported utterance, the introductory verb being seen as a contextual “translation” marker dependent on the reported clause. The degree of mutual semantic dependency between reporting verb and reported clause varies according to text type and to language-specific strategies, leading to the question of what is meant, in contrastive terms, by “faithful” translation of such verbs.

Massive bilingual corpora which can now be compiled with the available computing facilities are particularly relevant to conduct linguistic research in translation studies. The corpus of legal documents of the European Acquis have been aligned and investigated with two software packages, ALINEA and PARACONC. These corpora once aligned provide translation memories and terminology databases for a given field. Dealing with legal and technical documents in which recurring passages are frequent, professional translators improve the consistency and productivity of their production significantly.

While “global” English is today a reality that translators have to face in their everyday work, little research has yet been done into the implications of English as a lingua franca (ELF) for translation studies. After briefly looking at academic writings on ELF per se, I propose to introduce a distinction between different levels of competence of ELF-users and to examine the role that they may play firstly as initiators, then as translators (whether translating out of or into English), and finally as readers of texts. I then turn my attention to the way in which “ordinary” translators have necessarily to develop strategies in order to deal with ELF texts. In the final part of the paper, I look at the ways in which ELF should encourage translation theorists both to question the way in which they conceive of the translation operation, and to reconsider some of the key concepts that are commonly used, in particular the relationship pertaining between a source text and its translation.