In their well-known book Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais, the two Canadians Vinay and Darbelnet list a series of technical procedures, that – in the authors’ view - define the linguistic core of translational activity. A few years later, another linguist, Félix Kahn further explained and analysed these procedures. Through a number of seemingly innocent shifts José Lambert wants to show first how the two perspectives actually point at deeper inexplicit conflicts, and second how present-day translation studies can and should handle the same issue, in a very different way.