A great deal of ink has been shed over the question whether translation (ijn some senses) is possible and, if so, whether it can be (in some sense) faithful to thge original. It is possible that translation is like the flight of the bumblebee: unlikely in principle but a fact nontheless. Contemporary linguistics provides us with the concept of surface structure to denote the immediately observable organisation of an utterance. A great deal of translation focuses on the surface structure of the text, whose elements may be treated as more or less linearly ordered by units of translation.