This article deals with the causes of the disproportion between the importance of mass-media translation and the minimal attention paid to this subject by translation studies and attempts to provide a means to fill this void. The author proposes a model based on Gideon Toury, distinguishing between several levels of translational relations. The practice of film and television translation within a certain socio-cultural situation (performance level) is based on a fixed set of choices (competence level). This selection is governed by the intermediary norms level. Researchers of audiovisual translation have to take into account this distinction. The author describes their immediate tasks: the elaboration of a competence model, i.e. a theory of audiovisual translation based on various disciplines (film semiotics, translation theory, etc.) and the systematic and impartial analysis of translation history in order to find the normative mechanisms which define the translator's strategy.