The article examines the role of history in Translation Studies, focusing on two central issues within the field: the history of translation and periodization. First, the author reviews the theoretical and methodological debates on the role of history, from claims of an objective historical truth to the so-called new history. She further stesses that periodization is fundamentally subjective and marked by its time and the institutions that produce it. The author concludes that practice opens the way to the object, not the other way around. This explains why the object of translation is now moving and changing under the influence of linguistic, cutlural, or deconstructionis paradigms. This vision offer a perspective that makes it possible to look at the translaiton object not as a given but as a construction.