Objet de connaissance plus que d’analyse ou de compréhension pour le traducteur, la langue est aussi un fait social et le produit du langage. Elle existe pour tous les membres d’une collectivité linguistique quel que soit l’emploi qu’en fait chacun et a de ce fait un caractère objectif. Ayant pour but la communication, elle est acquise et est régie par des règles qui lui sont propres.  

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En traductologie, le texte original peut être défini comme le produit d’une interaction entre le traducteur et la matérialité d’une chaîne graphique ou sonore. Il dépasse le cadre de la langue et de la parole, objets statiques de savoir ; il est objet dynamique de compréhension. 

On traduit toujours un texte et non une langue : il est donc capital  de distinguer l’un de l’autre pour poser correctement les problèmes de traduction.

An object of knowledge more than one of analysis or understanding for the translator, Language (langue) is also a social fact and the product of human language (langage). It exists for all the members of a linguistic community whatever the use each individual makes of it and is thus objective by nature. Governed by its own rules, it is acquired and used as a means of communication.

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In Translation Studies, an original text can be defined as the result of the interaction between a translator and a material graphic or oral sequence. The term therefore goes beyond the confines of langue and parole which are static objects of knowledge, since a text is a dynamic object of understanding.

Langue: This is best translated as “a Language”. I capitalize Language to show that Saussure means this in a technical sense; it is not a language as ordinary people normally think of languages, for example in terms of the folk theory of a language as a collection of names pointing to things, or considering the facts of articulation as central, which most people do. He means by Langue a language in the sense of a system of linguistic social conventions. A Language is unitary. It is self-contained, a whole. It is a principle of classification (in modern terms, a categorization system.) It is a social product of human speech and a collection of conventions adopted by a social body to facilitate speech. It is acquired and conventional, and not strictly instinctual or natural. Humans have to learn it, unlike most of the animal communication systems that we know about.