As Antony Pym has pointed in his Exploring Translation Theories, there has been an excess of proposals explaining how sets of translations differ from one another. As the translation process seems doomed to suggest a dual division, most of these attempts have engendered dichotomies.

One of the difficulties in formally describing the phenomenon of translation and of setting translations apart from other texts as a category displaying specific features (and therefore deserving of specific and specialized attention) is to define what translation is.