To speak of an approach to translation implies that the work under discussion expresses and displays a comprehensive understanding of an area of study, and considers translational phenomena in the light of this comprehensive understanding. A linguistic approach to translation is informed by linguistics, and since the origins of linguistics (as opposed to philology and rhetoric) are usually considered to reside in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early twentieth century, this chapter does not deal with any work on translation preceding that time. Also, the chapter only covers work in which a comprehensive range of translational phenomena are described and explained in terms of linguistic concepts and categories. The linguistic approaches covered in this article are: Vinay and Darbelnet’s Saussurean approach; Catford’s systemic functional approach; Nida’s generative “dynamic” approach; Bell’s psycholinguistic approach; Halverson’s cognitive linguistic approach; and Gutt’s relevance theoretic approach.