In this paper, the author tackles the ever-difficult concept of the sentence from a translation perspective, relating it to units of translation and translating. She starts by pointing out and illustrating that the ‘reading of meaning’ is both subjective and ideologically constrained. In investigating the relationship between meaning and the sentence in the context of translation, she considers a number of quotations from Peter Newmark showing different facets of the issue: the sentence as an operational unit of translating, as the individual translator’s choice of unit as a construct in translation theory when seeking a definition of the unit of translation, and as a cognitively-defined ‘basic unit of thought’. Noting that a definition of ‘sentence’ is still missing, the author goes on to develop the question of whether the sentence is a translation unit from an operational point of view, opting for an empirical rather than a probabilistic approach.