This paper focuses on translation rules. In some studies on translation, people have tried to establish normative translation rules or some outlines to explain regularities about the translation process or to state certain standard structures and formats. The norms ruling the communicative behaviour in linguistic expressions and productions act like restrictions. The Applied Linguistics and the text-linguistics treated the translation as if it were a trans-codification process of terms first, and then of the text from the source language to the target one. So, when a text is thought to be an exact reproduction in the source language, the concept of equivalence appears. The options seem to be limited though the debate starts to be enlarged.