Linguistic regards translating as a linguistic discipline. Hence one is justified in asking what relevance linguistics has for the art of translating. With this question in mind, the present article examines various models and approaches in modern linguistics (contrastive grammar, transformational grammar, tagmemics). The author finds that modern linguistics has given too little attention to the problems of translating and proposes a re-orientation of linguistics. The objective of this re-orientation is a "textual linguistics".