À propos du concept d’unité dans les sciences du langage La question des unités de traduction

The concept of unit in the sciences of language takes on two very different senses, which lead to two specific axes of reflection. On the one hand, the question arises as to what point the multiple approaches developed within the sciences of language constitute a set having a synthetic or cumulative unity. Thus defined “from above,” the unit of the sciences of language calls for a reflection of an epistemological nature. But the units in the sciences of language can also be defined “from below,” in the sense that they refer to basic elements that are on the linguist to cut out from the phenomenon of language. These linguistic units (LU) are multiple and heterogeneous: they reflect by themselves the multiplicity of the approaches that the sciences of language gather. But, among these units, there are certain whose cutting does not correspond so much to the “scientific” project of a linguistic description (LU) but rather to the specific practical purposes of translation. Such units of translation (UT) call for a conceptualization properly traductological, that implies several fundamental inversions of perspective.